Designing for Sustainability: Involving Communities in Developing ICT Interventions to Support Water Resource Management

Rural Africans have poor access to clean and safe water compared to other developing areas. Many Information and Communication Technology (ICT) interventions have been implemented to address the information gaps that hinder improved service delivery but have subsequently failed. The inability to provide suitable content, failure to address priority needs of communities and foster local buy-in are seen as the main causes. The transition from developing technologies for users to developing with users has created the need to harness collective ideation. Developing community-based ICT interventions collaboratively with the user communities provides a better understanding of the cultural nuances that can easily affect the use and adoption of an intervention. In this paper, we present a landscape analysis of rural water supply management in Uganda and an ICT intervention implemented to support the community management model. We present findings and a justification for a more user-centered approach to developing sustainable ICT interventions through co-design

Using Activity Theory to Understand Technology Use and Perception among Rural Users in Uganda

Implementing technologies in developing communities often involves working with people that have a very different context from the researcher in terms of lower literacy and less experience with technology. Having worked with three rural communities in Uganda and introduced an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) intervention for water management, we use activity theory to analyse people's activities in relation to the use and uptake of the community-based ICT tool. To understand the contextual factors that influence the use of the tool, we proceed from our activity theory analysis and we unpack the perceptions and attitudes that rural technology users have towards technology. Our findings provide insights into what motivates and demotivates people in rural communities to use ICTs. We use our findings to substantiate the relevance of the intangible impacts of ICTs such as empowerment, social cohesion and improved self-worth for rural technology users. We recommend that technology designers be open to the unintended uses of the technologies they introduce in rural communities

Supporting community needs for rural water management through community-based co-design

We set out to support three rural communities in Uganda to manage their water supplies using a locally relevant and fit-for-use technological intervention developed with the Community-Based Co-design (CBCD) method. This participatory and inclusive approach allowed us to introduce Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to communities that are untrained and inexperienced in technology design. We describe the intervention and identify research learnings for CBCD. Our design experience with the communities highlights the barriers and enablers of using the CBCD method with rural users. We conclude with reflections on the use of intermediaries and the issue of reciprocity in community-based ICT for development researc

Codesigning with communities to support rural water management in Uganda

The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing regions has gained momentum due to their increasing affordability, particularly in rural areas where other ICT infrastructures for information management are often non-existent. Giving potential technology users, the opportunity to actively engage and contribute to the design of an artefact increases adoption and sustainable use. In this paper, we illustrate our application of community-based codesign (CBCD) that led to the development of an ICT intervention to support water management in three rural communities in Uganda. The community-based system helps water managers to track water users, payments and expenditures in a bid to improve transparency, accountability and trust. We present research learnings of the method and how engagement with rural communities can be improved through the use of intermediaries and paying more attention to community values as well as exercising ethics of reciprocity in community-based ICT initiatives

Enough with 'In-The-Wild'

HCI is a field of study that is no longer confined to European or North American usability labs. HCI is practiced all over the world, and within Euro-American contexts, HCI research is also increasingly turning its attention to real world settings, outside of the controlled environments of the usability lab. One increasingly popular approach to designing and evaluating new technologies in real-world settings is called 'in the wild' research. We find this terminology uncomfortable from an African perspective as it evokes negative connotations of the contexts in which we study and the people we study with. Our intention is not to discredit this approach but rather to start a conversation around the terminologies we use to describe our research approaches and contexts. We consider it an ethical imperative to be conscious of the words we use to describe people and places, not only as HCI research expands its empirical focus to real world settings, but equally importantly to support HCI research beyond its traditional centres in Europe or Americ

The Social Network: How People with Visual Impairment use Mobile Phones in Kibera, Kenya

Living in an informal settlement with a visual impairment can be very challenging resulting in social exclusion. Mobile phones have been shown to be hugely beneficial to people with sight loss in formal and high-income settings. However, little is known about whether these results hold true for people with visual impairment (VIPs) in informal settlements. We present the findings of a case study of mobile technology use by VIPs in Kibera, an informal settlement in Nairobi. We used contextual interviews, ethnographic observations and a co-design workshop to explore how VIPs use mobile phones in their daily lives, and how this use influences the social infrastructure of VIPs. Our findings suggest that mobile technology supports and shapes the creation of social infrastructure. However, this is only made possible through the existing support networks of the VIPs, which are mediated through four types of interaction: direct, supported, dependent and restricted