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Assessment of community wellness outcomes to measure ICT impact

Published: 07 December 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Measuring the development impacts of ICTD interventions continues to be an unresolved problem, especially when trying to include non-traditional development measures beyond economic growth, such as empowerment and social capital. A growing body of work shows that the impact of ICTD programs is more frequently related to capabilities and other non-material notions of wellness, and that these aspects are easily missed when looking only at traditional tangible outcomes such as income or economic growth, education and health. We argue for an alternate approach that measures non-material impacts of ICTD, which we term Community Wellness Outcomes (CWO). We suggest measurement instruments (qualitative and quantitative) to assess CWO related to self-efficacy/self-esteem, expressions of aspirations, personal relations, and civic engagement. Through testing in community settings in Brazil (LAN Houses) and in Colombia (public libraries) we will refine and validate the measurement of CWO as a way to understand non-material impacts of ICTD from the perspective of human capabilities and community wellness, offering a more complete picture of the contributions of ICT to community development than those that rely solely on traditional economic development measures.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICTD '13: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development: Notes - Volume 2
    December 2013
    214 pages
    ISBN:9781450319072
    DOI:10.1145/2517899
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

    Sponsors

    • IPID: International Network for Postgraduate Students in the area of ICT4D
    • University of the Western Cape: University of the Western Cape
    • Nokia
    • Google Inc.
    • Microsoft: Microsoft
    • University of Cape Town
    • Microsoft Reasearch: Microsoft Reasearch
    • IDRC: International Development Research Centre
    • IBM: IBM

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 07 December 2013

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    Author Tags

    1. ICTD
    2. empowerment
    3. evaluation
    4. social capital
    5. wellness

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    ICTD 2013
    Sponsor:
    • IPID
    • University of the Western Cape
    • Microsoft
    • Microsoft Reasearch
    • IDRC
    • IBM

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 22 of 116 submissions, 19%

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    • (2022)“We dream of climbing the ladder; to get there, we have to do our job better”: Designing for Teacher Aspirations in rural Côte d’IvoireProceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies10.1145/3530190.3534794(122-138)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2022
    • (2021)Strengthening ICT4D evaluation: lessons from the fields of program evaluation, IS/IT evaluation, and aid/development evaluationInformation Technology for Development10.1080/02681102.2021.187661927:2(381-415)Online publication date: 15-Feb-2021
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    • (2018)Radio, library, and storytelling: Building an information system for indigenous community development in Chiapas, MexicoTHE ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES10.1002/isd2.1206285:1Online publication date: 12-Oct-2018
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