Niels Nielsen

Mobile Technologies in Rural Development: an African Context

Funding: College Research Award
Supervisor: Professor Tim Unwin
Advisor: Dr Dorothea Kleine
Email: n.p.nielsen@rhul.ac.uk

Mobile Technologies are said to be the tool with which Africa’s rural areas can make use of Information and Communication Technologies for development (ICT4D). The growth in mobile technologies thus carries the promise for rural Africans to access stable, low-cost and long-distance means of communication for the first time ever.

The beneficial use of mobile technologies, for example mobile telephony, has been investigated mainly from an economic point of view. It is seen as a positive contribution to overcome the communicative barriers (lack of electricity and land lines) that rural economic agents face. Within development economics it is the lack of information that has been regarded as the major inhibitor to economic development, because people without information on the market are unable to make sound economic decisions (Joseph E. Stiglitz has been the main advocate of this opinion).

My research aims to situate, problematise, and qualify this opinion through investigating the change in the situation of speech, communication patterns as well as the political dimension and social meaning of ‘information’ (with Jürgen Habermas being the main proponent of this idea).

This is done by investigating why and how rural residents buy and use diverse mobile technologies, and recording of life-histories to grasp how mobile technologies have affected individual lives and communities in Africa.

The research aims to point to a way forward beyond seeing the rural resident at the receiving end of market information but to put ICTs to use as an empowering and emancipative tool for rural residents.

This research forms part of the wider research and advocacy project taken on by the Geography Departments’ ICT4D Collective.