13 research outputs found
Feminist Futures of Work:Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy
The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work—what we term as “FemWork" —is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. This volume offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful
Essays on Strategies for Increasing Repayment Rates of Digital Microloans
Access to credit can act as a highly effective tool for poverty reduction and economic growth. The ability to borrow increases the propensity of low-income people to start and maintain businesses, educate their children and withstand financial shocks. These factors, in turn, can help them to move out of poverty and lead to more sustainable economic development. However, traditional financial institutions have inherent limitations that have impeded their ability to serve the poor.
Digital lenders are able to leverage the widespread adoption of mobile phones and mobile money to extend credit quickly and conveniently to more people, especially in developing countries. However, due to a lack of credit bureaus and available financial histories of borrowers, digital lenders frequently need to amass vast amounts of data in order to screen borrowers and experiment to find the appropriate loan amount by gradually increasing credit limits based on past repayment. This can lead to high user default rates and over-indebtedness. The lack of collateral during loan applications also means that digital lenders have limited mechanisms for enforcing repayment of loans. Both of these challenges threaten to limit further adoption of digital credit.
Through three experimental studies conducted with an airtime lender, I explore theoretical and empirical mechanisms for reducing default rates of digital loans. In the first study, I demonstrate that limited mobile phone data contain enough signals for creating effective credit assessment methods that minimize privacy risks to borrowers. In the second study, I find that increasing credit limits negatively impacts repayments and future borrowing, and offer recommendations for increasing credit limits while minimizing the drawbacks. In the final study, I draw on theories from psychology and consumer behavior to develop vivid repayment reminders. This study found that vivid reminders had limited effectiveness for increasing loan repayment and reducing loan duration. Taken together, these three studies propose new avenues for digital lenders to reduce default rates. The hope of this dissertation is that these proposed methods would lead to a reduction in interest rates, that would ultimately benefit the borrowers
The Automation of the Taxi Industry – Taxi Drivers’ Expectations and Attitudes Towards the Future of their Work
Advocates of autonomous driving predict that the occupation of taxi driver could be made obsolete by shared autonomous vehicles (SAV) in the long term. Conducting interviews with German taxi drivers, we investigate how they perceive the changes caused by advancing automation for the future of their business. Our study contributes insights into how the work of taxi drivers could change given the advent of autonomous driving: While the task of driving could be taken over by SAVs for standard trips, taxi drivers are certain that other areas of their work such as providing supplementary services and assistance to passengers would constitute a limit to such forms of automation, but probably involving a shifting role for the taxi drivers, one which focuses on the sociality of the work. Our findings illustrate how taxi drivers see the future of their work, suggesting design implications for tools that take various forms of assistance into account, and demonstrating how important it is to consider taxi drivers in the co-design of future taxis and SAV services
Interdisciplinarity, Self-governance and Dialogue: The Participatory Process underpinning the Minimum Ethical Standards for ICTD/ICT4D Research
Concerns about ethical issues in ICTD/ICT4D research have been growing in recent years,
alongside calls to agree minimum ethical standards. This paper reflects on the three-year
participatory process, co-facilitated by the authors, that has led to collective agreement on
such a set of minimum ethical standards for ICTD/ICT4D research. The standards have been
published (at http://www.ictdethics.org) under a Creative Commons licence, and are open for
further comment. The current version has been endorsed by the ICTD conference series, and
there is ongoing dialogue about their implementation by other conferences, journals, and
funding bodies.
While the standards themselves are a collective effort, in this paper the facilitators lay out
their own specific thinking and approach to the co-production process that they designed and
facilitated. It considers the successes, potential for further improvement, as well as critical
features underpinning the standards’ legitimacy. These reflections may help guide other
research communities interested in such participatory self-regulation processes
Ethical standards for the ICTD/ICT4D community: A participatory process and a co-created document
We recommend reading this poster in combination with the full ethical standards document: [LINK omitted for review]
ICTD/ICT4D research is multi-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder and based in different cultural contexts, yet in recent years calls have been heard to agree minimum ethical standards across this field. This paper documents the participatory process we co-facilitated in response to these calls on behalf of the community, and presents the resulting document as collectively agreed set of minimum ethical standards, to be reviewed and updated in years to come. We call on journals, conference organizers, reviewers, ethics committees, institutional review boards and funders to uphold these standards and support their implementation
The datafication of anti-poverty programmes: Evidence from the Public Distribution System in Karnataka
The notion of datafication implies rendering existing objects, actions and processes into data. This research-in-progress paper focuses on the meaning of datafication for anti-poverty programmes, conceived as social welfare schemes designed specifically for poor people. Drawing on a state-level case study of the adoption of Aadhaar, India’s biometric population database, within the main national food security programme, we illustrate a techno-rational perspective that views datafication as capable of enhancing the effectiveness of anti-poverty schemes. At the same time, field narratives collected from beneficiaries show multiple forms of data injustice including informational gaps, restriction of the universal right to food to the enrolled, and exclusion of entitled households from service provision. Based on the qualitative research conducted on the scheme we put forward a politically embedded view of data, framing datafication as a transformative force that concurs to deep reform of existing anti-poverty programmes