Technology for Developing Regions

Related Faculty

Morgan Ames

Assistant Professor of Practice
Alumni (MIMS 2006)

Science and technology studies; computer-supported cooperative work and social computing; education; anthropology; youth technocultures; ideology and inequity; critical data science

Joshua Blumenstock

Associate Professor
Alumni (PhD 2012)

Development Economics, Data Science, Machine Learning, Econometrics, ICTD

Jenna Burrell

Professor

how marginalized communities adapt technology, algorithmic fairness and opacity, human control over algorithms, ethnography

Recent Publications

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child

Nov 12, 2019

In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why — despite its failures — the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development.

Mapping poverty using mobile phone and satellite data

Feb 1, 2017

Material Ecosystems: Theorizing (Digital) Technologies in Socio-Economic Development

Mar 1, 2016

The Myth of Market Price Information: Mobile Phones and the Application of Economic Knowledge in ICTD

Apr 22, 2015

From Farm to Farmville: Circulation, Adoption, and Use of ICT between Urban and Rural China

Dec 20, 2013

Revisiting the Fishers of Kerala, India

Sep 1, 2013

MobileWorks: Designing for Quality in a Managed Crowdsourcing Architecture

Oct 1, 2012

The Evolving Braid: An Ethnography of Technology Change in Uganda

May 11, 2012

Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana.

May 1, 2012

Essays on the Economic Impacts of Mobile Phones in Sub-Saharan Africa

Apr 30, 2012

Technology for Developing Regions news

To reach the world’s poorest, Josh Blumenstock says to design for dumb phones

Mar 8, 2018

Alumna’s Nonprofit Start-up Seeks to Break the Cycle of Illiteracy

May 1, 2017

Dost, cofounded by alumna Sindhuja Jeyabal (MIMS ’16), is an educational nonprofit providing India’s illiterate mothers regular audio calls with instructions to prepare their children for kindergarten.

Novel Information System Addresses Unemployment in India's Informal Labor Market

May 9, 2014

Five School of Information students are developing a system to solve one of the biggest challenges of India’s market for household domestic workers, and to help a whole community that isn’t being served.

Tapan Parikh Is a Sloan Foundation Rising Star

Feb 18, 2014

Parikh is transforming the world’s poorest areas by designing, evaluating, and deploying appropriate information systems that support sustainable economic development.

How Government Documents Enable Transparency and Accountability

Feb 6, 2014

New research presents case studies from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; Rajasthan, India, at the turn of the 20th century; and a present-day Indian welfare system.

Scholars Present New Research into Technology Use and Development

Dec 11, 2013

Faculty, Ph.D. students, and alumni present over a dozen papers, notes, demonstrations, and workshops at the international Information and Communication Technologies and Development conference in Cape Town, South Africa.

Can Open Government Initiatives Combat Corruption?

Oct 8, 2013

Ph.D. student Rajesh Veeraraghavan is analyzing the effects of an Indian “open government” initiative, which uses information transparency to fight corruption in the distribution of government benefits.

I School Faculty & Students Head to Paris for CHI 2013

Apr 25, 2013

Eight I School faculty and students will be presenting their research at the upcoming CHI Conference in Paris, France.

Ph.D. Student Honored for Research on Internet Use in Rural China

Mar 27, 2013

Elisa Oreglia honored for the best graduate student paper on China and inner Asia at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference.

Social Enterprises Launch From the Classroom to the Real World

Oct 25, 2012

Updates on five student projects from the course “Information and Communications Technologies for Social Enterprise” that have already become full-fledged companies serving the developing world — plus a web platform that is just about to to open its doors to the public.