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Roger Harris Associates

Links between Academic Research and Practice: A Short Position Piece for IFIP Working Group 9.4 which address the Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries

29/1/2011

5 Comments

 
My experience as both an academic and a practitioner in two disciplines; Information Systems and ICT4D, has been that there’s very little interaction between practitioners and academics in either discipline.  Perhaps this is typical of other areas and therefore it may be naïve and/or unrealistic to expect that there should be with WG9.4.  But in the case of ICT4D this is a pity. There are many lines of enquiry that could be usefully explored by those who are equipped with the skills that academics possess and which could usefully inform practice towards ICT implementations that are more robust and effective in their pursuit of poverty reduction. 

Generally, practitioners in ICT4D don’t attend academic conferences because they know there will be little by way of any practical take-aways that they can use.  They don’t read academic journals for the same reason.  Moreover, it seems rare to see any summarised form of the findings of academic research in the media channels that policy-makers and their advisers do read.  The more serious media that such people tend to take notice of, such as The Economist or the Wall Street Journal, seem to conduct their own research and they nearly always come up rather superficial conclusions; like “telecentres are unsustainable” or “mobile phones have closed the digital divide” or “increasing the density of mobile phones boosts GDP.”  It needs an academic approach to dig beneath these superficial generalizations  to recapture the complexities and to help practitioners and policy makers come to the more nuanced conclusions that are closer to reality. 

Possibly the most important area where academic research can contribute to practice is in the area of project evaluation and impact assessment.  There are many aspects of orthodox development practice that do not lend themselves well to the application of ICTs to development problems.  What often occurs is that the problem is shaped to suit the tools available for solving it, rather than the other way round.  Evaluation is one area where this stands out as an inhibitor of learning within the practitioner community. 

We should ask if the academic community is concerned that practitioners remain largely un-interested in their work.  Perhaps they’re not; it’s clear that academics conduct research, attend conferences and publish their results in the leading journals in order to survive within their professional situations.  There doesn’t seem to be a component of any sort of practitioner linking that would contribute seriously to this process. I remember MISQ used to have an “Executive Summary” in each edition, presumably as a way of linking its research to practice, although I couldn’t find any such thing on their web site after 10 minutes of hunting.  In the closed-loop community of IS research there’s probably more effort goes into counting citations than reaching out to the IS professionals. 

It seems a pity for the same to happen in ICT4D.  The developing world academics that I work with seem to have a genuine concern for how their work can contribute towards their country’s progress.  They are under less pressure to publish in leading journals and they have less access to resources for attending international conferences.  Generally budgets for conducting research are miniscule anyway.  The bi-lateral and multi-lateral donor organisations that have far greater access to funds tend to conduct their own research, ignoring the in-country academic resources that they could bring into their programmes and squandering the opportunity for learning that such involvement offers (in both directions). 

So beyond the general question of the legitimacy of academic-practitioner links, what does this mean for WG9.4? Whilst others may disagree, I would argue that there are benefits to be had for both communities from closer links between the two.  ICT4D practitioners need practical solutions to their pressing concerns, a few of which can be identified briefly here as; achieving sustainability; rolling out applications for mobile phones; scaling up from pilot projects to national programmes; conducting evaluations and impact assessments; promoting technology convergence and synergies;  formulating pro-poor approaches; and devising demand-driven methods.

A cursory glance through the WG9.4 programmes since 1998 doesn’t reveal too many instances of these topics, which is an observation not a criticism, but for some researchers there is some satisfaction to be had from the knowledge that they are addressing real-world problems, so a mechanism for surfacing them could be of interest.  For the practitioners, there’s the potential benefit of rigour and independence in their evaluation research enquiries, which is again not always to be found in the sort of practitioner studies that confuse correlation with causation and which often generate rather predictable outcomes when conducted by the project implementers. 

Two particular aspects of WG9.4 present themselves in the context of fostering closer practitioner links.  They are identity and outreach.  The original remit of ‘social implications’ seems to have less clarity and to be less relevant than the current focus on ICT4D, which is emerging now by popular demand. Is WG9.4 doing ICT4D or is it just a sub-set of its realm?  There are practitioners in ICT4D but I don’t know any working in the area of ‘social implications of computers.’ The name continues to reflect the early conceptualization of 9.4 which arose before ICTs were recognized as a tool for poverty reduction (viewing poverty here in its widest sense of social and economic inequality).  It seems that the Group can no longer be regarded as a sub-branch of Information Systems, but whose members are now more likely to regard themselves as belonging to a branch of Development.  In either case, the issue of links with practice remains; the only question is; which community of practitioners to connect with?

The current name of the Group is therefore an immediate inhibiter of potential ICT4D practitioner interest. So along with the name and the identity which it conveys, the Group may wish to re-consider its core mission if there is a desire to engage with ICT4D practitioners.   If not, then there’s no such need.  Some may shrink from the idea, given that there’s already an ICTD conference, but surely there’s enough room for more than one? There’s another potential identity problem here regarding the difference between ICT4D and ICTD (if there is one), which I’m not going to debate here, but it may be worth mentioning that the recent ICTD2010 conference in London was organized by the ICT4D Collective at Royal Holloway, University of London, and it aimed to provide a forum for those with interests in information and communication technologies in development practice (my emphasis).

The second aspect is outreach – to members and potential members. With today’s technology it’s easy to cultivate an on-line community with more-or-less continuous interaction. Whilst we have the Group email list, there are more effective tools for supporting an on-line community and which would encourage new members by being more open and inviting and clearer about the Group’s identity, purpose and activities and therefore more appealing to non-academics. 

As a final point, I would like to raise another issue.  I attend many conferences/workshops /seminars on ICT4D (although not 9.4 for, as a practitioner, the reasons mentioned), but usually I notice that there are no poor people in the room.  In fact, the events take place in locations that poor people never visit.  Why is this?  Why should development issues be debated without any participation of those who are intended to benefit?  There are gains to be had from forging links not only between academics and practitioners but also between them and the poor people who suffer from the problems that they are trying to solve. 

Everybody benefits when this happens, and I have demonstrated how this can work with the eBario Knowledge Fair (eBKF). This is a multi-disciplinary biennial conference held in the remote indigenous village of Bario, Malaysia, in the central highlands of Borneo.  eBario is a multi-award winning telecentre project that I began in 1998.  We are setting up a community radio station there this year (Malaysia’s first).  The first eBKF was held on 2007, the next one will be in November 2011.  The event works because the community comes together with the pundits to discuss local (and wider) development issues.  It’s an approach that 9.4 could consider in bringing academics closer to practice.

Roger Harris; Hong Kong; January 2011
5 Comments
Robert Davison link
29/1/2011 09:10:08 pm

Roger, I appreciate the sentiments here - all of them. In particular, I was struck by your observation that the poor people whom we are supposedly trying to benefit are never in the room. I don't suppose that they will read your blog either - or comment on it. In KTM, the same is likely to be true, though at least I hope that more Nepali researchers will be in the room - and they are best placed to contact the poor - if they wish to do so. Do they?

Some of the research papers sent in to EJISDC genuinely are about poverty reduction and ICT4D, but many are not. Instead, they are about ICT in Developing Countries. Perhaps that is the fault of the journal, which is titled this way. Should we relabel as EJIS4PR (Poverty Reduction)? Indeed, should 9.4 do something similar?

I think that these are debating points that we could bring up in KTM - see how the membership reacts. There is a serious risk that these conferences become junkets for those who can afford them. Trips to exotic locations. Also, that we end up studying topics that are ever more distant from doing anything positive. Too often, we report on case materials that describe this or that project - work done by others. But do we do anything ourselves? I'd advocate more action research, where we do study, but we also strive to make a difference - personally. As you do in Bario.

Robert

Reply
Mahfuz Ashraf
30/1/2011 12:59:23 am

I agree with Roger about the necessity of bridging the gap between academicia and practitioners. But different groups of people have their own interest and everyone is trying to fulfill their own ; academic wants ranked publication otherwise they won't be promoted, NGOs/practioners are looking for another round of Grant while reaching at the end of an ongoing project, donors put priority on their own agendas leaving behind the country specific DEMAND not need. So i think this is really a great challenge to bring bring these two groups under a common platform! Really appreciated e-bario knowledge fair and hope this sort of knowledge transformation will be continuing in other parts of the Globe just like scholarship for DCs researcher to present papers in ICTD conference.

One of my graduate students asked me how many poor countries in this World became developed fighting against poverty! There might have slight improvement within the layer of 3rd World nation but no one or few nation upwarded from 3rd to 1st World. World bank perhaps introduced new layers ( e.g. least developed -developing)just to demonstrate slight improvement or cover their failure! Mirco credit in bangladesh has now criticised a lot bacause of dysfunctional effects e.g. male became idle since they loan is provided to women, poor saving attitude of poor forced them to fall under debt where as in earlier they had 0 debt. So, echoing with Roger, we need REAL results ( outcome/ouput/impact etc) of ICT4D initiatives to see whether it reduced poverty or not. This can only be done through M&E research where both academicia and practicioners need to acknowledge each other. Othersie, the whole ICT4D disciple will be questionable.

People may ask us; Are you giving wrong medicine to a poorly identified problem?

Reply
Michael Gurstein link
30/1/2011 02:07:24 am

Hi Roger,

Excellent post and a very good set of questions.

As you know, I like you have moved back and forth between academe and practice and a good deal of my efforts over the years have been concerned with figuring out and implementing how to bring the two together.

For me, the advantages for academics is that they get interesting (and important) subjects to deal with; for the practitioners/people in the field the advantage is that their issues are addressed by smart people, with time and some resources/infrastructure to work on those issues. It has always seemed to me to a fairly natural and obvious win-win and my work in and around and for Community Informatics has been primarily motivated by these interests.

Unfortunately it has always proven more difficult and problematic than I had anticipated. The fairly recently completed research project – the Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN) was specifically designed to work with community partners on research issues which were meant to be of mutual interest. However, in reality the research funding (from the Canadian SSRC) was primarily directed towards supporting graduate students and any contribution/participation from the (generally severely under-resourced) community was done at their cost.

As well, while the benefits of the research were structured to support the academics (publications, conferences) etc. the communities had very very great difficulty in getting their needs responded to (assistance in background work for proposal preparation, assistance in evaluation design etc.) as the grad students weren’t very interested and the academics didn’t have the skills or weren’t being rewarded for that kind of activity. (there is a couple of chapters explicitly on this and it is implicit as a thread throughout much of the rest of the about to be published book on CRACIN “Connecting Canadians: Investigations in Community Informatics, expected publication date is June 2011, Athabaska University Press.)

There are very strong institutional barriers to breaking down the research/practice silos which doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be addressed but rather that addressing them needs to be done at quite deep institutional levels. (I’ve addressed these and related issues in my book What is Community Informatics (And Why Does It Matter)? And throughout my blog contributions http://gurstein.wordpress.com specifically a recent one critiquing “Open ICT4D” and another one on "Community Informatics Research and Telecentre Development".

Reply
Chris Westrup
30/1/2011 09:31:25 pm

Dear Roger,
I think you make a series of excellent points that are important for a group such as the 9.4 group http://www.ifipwg94.org.uk/ and ICT4D more generally. I think that general agreement exists that academic engagement in ICT4D can be useful. As you put it '[i]t needs an academic approach to dig beneath these superficial generalizations to recapture the complexities and to help practitioners and policy makers come to the more nuanced conclusions ...' but it also can be a problem too. On the positive side, academics can be well placed to work with practitioners on specific projects; to provide useful 'distance' at times from the day to day of specific projects, to identify contributions, new practices, emerging themes, and evaluate outcomes. On the negative side, academic priorities may be focused on simply talking to other academics; on ignoring the practical implications of ICT4D and on providing ‘armchair’ theorizing lacking engagement with the nitty gritty of development. What to do? A few tentative suggestions:
First, ICT4D is a broad and rapidly expanding category. In a way sustained focus is important on key areas: ICT4D for poverty reduction; ICT4D and health; ICT4D and development management; to name but three. Many necessary overlaps exist, but there is place for both more focus on specific areas and more holistic appraisals of ICT4D. To my mind a fruitful line of work is to focus on outcomes and on how development takes place. The two together couple the issues of impact and how that impact is achieved (or isn’t achieved) which should produce practical guidance for the future.
Second, the diversity of academics needs a little unpicking. A common area of agreement should be the involvement of local academics in local development projects and in contributing to ICT4D research more generally. More regional workshops and further collaboration between academics and practitioners should help here. In a number of research intensive universities, academics are finding it difficult to defend their work in this area unless they publish in highly rated journals which tend to favour, what seems from the outside to be, self referential, often dry and obscure contributions. In these situations academics need to continue to use and create outlets for a wider variety of work and to value pragmatic and rigorous research in ICT4D. To a large extent this is an ongoing debate within that academic community which needs solutions.
Third, it would be a great idea to find ways to engage academics in what practitioners find are the pressing issues requiring research some of which you pick out such as ‘achieving sustainability; rolling out applications for mobile phones; scaling up from pilot projects to national programmes …’. How this is done is an interesting question but I do think that research needs to be weaned away from technology as solution centred research. A forum that identifies key practitioner issues in ICT4D and invites contributions/collaborations with academics to develop solutions is one idea.
Returning to the 9.4 group, it only works because (and when) it attracts academics and practitioners (from ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries) to debate and exchange research and ideas. I agree that the next conference in Kathmandu (in May http://www.ifipwg94.org.uk/ifip-conference-2011) is a great opportunity to rethink what contributions it can make in the future. Hopefully a number of local academics and practitioners will be present and further debate before the event should help us all to be clearer on how to craft practical solutions to, at least, some of these problems.
Chris

Reply
Roger Harris link
13/2/2011 12:41:06 pm

Thanks to all who have commented and also to anyone else who may still wish to or has read up to now anyway without commenting.

I’ll attempt to summarise what we have so far, in the following points;

1. There’s a question regarding what is meant by ICT4D, which seems worth asking in order to get close to some indication that we’re all singing off the same song-sheet. There are aspects relating to poverty reduction, which raise the issue of what we mean by poverty, and there are also aspects of ICT use in developing countries that are not necessarily directed specifically at reducing poverty. So how do we regard ICT4D in relation to these (and probably other) aspects of the area that IFIP9.4 addresses?

2. In addition to discussing links between academics and practitioners, the theme of links with beneficiaries emerges, as well as the sub-theme of links with developing country academics. (Regarding the latter by the way, there are multiple possible combinations to consider; nationality, domicile and place of work, in judging who is a developing country academic). Closer relationships with developing country academics provide a means of forming closer relationships with developing country beneficiaries.

3. There seems to be overall agreement that it would be desirable to forge closer links among all the groups identified as a way of synergising and complementing each other’s capacities. However, there are serious obstacles that will inhibit achieving this, including institutional barriers. The challenge is to find a common ground that is capable of satisfying differing interests and that is substantial enough to attract them all. At the same time, there seems to be an opportunity to fashion mechanisms that would be capable of doing so by emphasising mutual interests and by focussing on shared concerns. Making academic publications more accessible is one such mechanism.

4. The need to better understand the shaping of outcomes emerges as a general theme for both academics and practitioners. Accordingly, the area of impact assessment and evaluation of interventions could be a candidate topic capable of appealing to both groups and potentially drawing them into some form of joint deliberation.

5. IFIP9.4 is a suitable platform to promote the issue of linkages and the Kathmandu event is a timely opportunity to do so.

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    Dr. Roger Harris works as an advocate for the use of Information and Communication Technologies in poverty reduction and rural development.

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