The program is an eighteen-month project sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and managed by Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, in collaboration with scholars from Universidad de San Andrés, Argentina, and the University of the Philippines. It will award up to 12 Research Fellowships to teams of emerging scholars from developing countries in Africa and the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean. These fellowships will provide research grant funding and specialized mentoring guidance to enable Fellows to carry out a new original research study.

The Global Impact Study has identified several areas for in-depth investigation, and has started working on the first three:

• Infomediaries: public access brokers
• Collaborative knowledge sharing
• Non-instrumental use of ICT as a component of general ICT skill acquisition
• Mobiles and public access venues
• The life cycle of public access venues
• Community information ecologies
• Direct and indirect impacts
• Non-users
• Willingness to pay
• Policy and regulation
• Institutional and stakeholder influence
• The effect of venue rules and regulations on use
• The role of networks in venue ecosystems
• Local content
• Venue architecture and design
• IT skills, training, and employment
• The relationship between the costs and benefits of providing public access to ICT

The Global Impact Study team will start work on more of these areas — but we won’t be able to pursue all of them. Our goal, therefore, is to enable other researchers to take up our ideas to continue this research.

The Amy Mahan Research Fellowship Program is one way to reach this goal. We are excited to contribute to developing new researchers and furthering research on the impacts of public access ICT.

For more information on the Amy Mahan Research Fellowship Program, including application instructions, please visit the fellowship program website.

Photo of Amy by Bruce Girard, 2008.

With support from the municipality and BiblioRedes, a network 387 public libraries dedicated to improving public access and community uses of ICTs, this library/telecenter in Puerto Saavedra, Chile, provides books and information resources, a space for kids to do homework, Internet training, and help accessing online government services. (photo courtesy of telecentre.org)

What difference does public access to information and communication technologies (ICT) make in the lives of poor or marginalized people? Years of research have yet to produce concrete evidence of impact — as found in libraries, telecenters, and cybercafés. After conducting a comprehensive review of the literature in this area, we now know that there is a pressing need for systematic and comprehensive research to identify the downstream impacts, and to provide empirical evidence about the precise link (if any) between public access ICT use and impacts in areas such as health, education, and governance. The Global Impact Study is designed to address this gap.

Based on a year of exploratory fieldwork, we have created a research design that delves deeper and wider into public access impact than other studies to date. Our main research goal is to identify the observable impacts of public access and to gauge the magnitude and costs of these impacts. Our research design highlights six areas of inquiry:

1. Geographic and social reach of public access
2. Usage patterns
3. Physical design and layout of public access venues
4. Venue services and operational conditions
5. The ecology of information and communication resources within communities
6. Policy and regulatory influences

We hypothesize that there is a relationship between each of these six areas and the impacts emerging from use of public access ICT.

Previous studies have focused on one or two of these areas at a time. The Global Impact Study aims to touch on all of them to some degree. Additionally, out of the numerous areas of potential impact, this project will focus on:

• employment and income
• education
• civic engagement
• health
• democracy and government transparency
• culture and language preservation

ICT impacts are complex and diverse, so our research design combines multiple methods to examine different types and levels of uses and impacts.

First, inventories of public access facilities in four to six countries will provide a baseline count and description of existing venues against which we can assess the magnitude of the public access phenomena, reach, and distribution. Based on these inventories, we will be able to make some basic statements about the contribution of public access to the availability of ICTs.

Second, broad-based surveys of public access venues, users, and non-users in these same countries will narrow in on issues at an intermediate level, such as why people use public access ICT venues, and how operational structures influence the outcomes venues are able to engender.

Finally, a series of in-depth studies in an expanded set of countries will investigate key impact mechanisms using different methods to provide richer data than can be collected with the general inventory and survey methodologies. Questions being investigated include:

• What is the value-added of knowledge workers such as librarians at public access venues?
• Does the ability to engage in playful uses of ICTs at public access venues contribute to public access impact?
• Do public access venues facilitate valuable forms of collaborative learning among users?

We have identified several other potential areas of research, a selection of which will be pursued over the remaining four years of the Global Impact Study. These include public access model life cycles, indirect impacts, non-users, willingness to pay, local content, employment, community information ecologies, and mobile telephony.

While this study will not exhaust these research areas, our broader goal is to lay out a research agenda that provides a common framework and vocabulary, highlights key elements, and demonstrates how researchers can build on our work to contribute findings that further develop and refine our understanding of the public access ICT puzzle. To this end, we are adopting an open research approach where our research processes, tools, data, and findings will be accessible to others.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are widely acknowledged as important resources for socio-economic development. Due to resource constraints, shared access forms the dominant mode of access to these technologies in most developing countries. Governments, non-governmental institutions and entrepreneurs have invested significant amounts of human and financial resources in public libraries, telecenters, internet cafés, and other forms of public access — without clear evidence on what the ultimate outcomes will be and the actual costs.  This report presents a review of empirical research on the impacts of public access to ICTs in order to document what is known about this approach to ICT service delivery.

The results show that there is limited conclusive evidence on downstream impacts of public access to ICTs. The evidence that does exist suggests that the public access ICT model is not living up to the expectations placed on it. This is not necessarily because public access has had no impacts, but because its impact is particularly difficult to identify and measure. As a model, public access to ICTs has experienced success and failure, leading to both reinforcement of the belief that the model should be expanded and strengthened, as well as to claims that public access ICTs are ultimately ineffective or even counter-productive from a development perspective.

Four main types of evidence are identified: evidence on venue performance and sustainability, users, usage patterns, and downstream impacts. Assessment of this evidence indicates that trends are most apparent in the first three areas, while evidence of downstream impacts remains elusive. Most studies show that sustainability is a critical challenge especially in low resource, low income environments where commercial services are not viable. They also show that users are primarily young males with relatively high socio-economic status and prior access to computers and the Internet. Users tend to engage mainly  in social and personal activities as opposed to economic activities, for example. Findings on downstream impacts fall on both sides of the equation: some studies conclude that impacts are high in a variety of areas (development of ICT skills, job creation, civic engagement etc), while others find limited impacts.

There is as yet no definitive evidence-based statement on the impacts of public access to ICTs. A research agenda is required that shifts from individual case studies and nominal level impact claims, to lines of enquiry that not only cut across contexts, but also utilize methodologies that (whether quantitative or qualitative) enable some quantification of identified impacts.

CITATION
Sey, Araba, and M. Fellows. April 2009. Literature Review on the Impact of Public Access to Information and Communication Technologies. CIS Working Paper No. 6, University of Washington Center for Information & Society, Seattle.

It includes issues, methods, main findings, and gaps in the literature. This review does not include documents that only describe a specific project; that only discuss public access typologies, definitions, or policy; or that critically comment on public access strategies. Also excluded are documents that discuss the socioeconomic impact of ICTs in general.

The review focuses mainly on electronically accessible research articles and on research published after 1999. The documents were accessed via database searches as well as directly from members of the Global Impact Study community.

Main findings:

Most of the literature leans toward formative (process) evaluation as opposed to summative (impact) evaluations. Several reports that claim to be examining impacts in reality present data and conclusions on venue access and use patterns.

Studies have not established a clear link between public access to ICTs and socioeconomic change/impacts. Researchers are beginning to go beyond anecdotal evidence of public access impacts on end-users, but are still limited in their ability to make definitive statements about impacts. There is a trend toward the view that the impacts of public access to ICTs are so highly tied to contexts that generalizability may be impractical.

Research conclusions generally still speak to the potential rather than actual impact of public access to ICTs. Aside from the fact that impacts are difficult to measure and attribute, this could be linked to the tendency for most studies to find that public access is underperforming. Despite overall dissatisfaction with the performance of public access ICTs, the perception that they are an important means of bridging digital gaps remains strong.

Limited application or testing of theory and hypotheses. Very few studies are placed in the context of any theoretical framework (other than the general idea of ICTs for development). Some exceptions are:

• Actor-Network (Ashraf, Swatman & Hanisch, 2007)
• Diffusion of Innovation (Ashraf et al., 2007; Hudson, 2001; Rajendra Kumar & Best, 2006b; Simpson, 2005)
• Ecology of Games (Qiu & Zhou, 2005)
• Stakeholder Theory (Bailur, 2006)
• Sustainable Livelihoods (Parkinson, 2005; Parkinson & Rami­rez, 2006; UNCTAD, 2008)
• Sustainability/Failure Model (Rajendra Kumar & Best, 2006a)

Even fewer studies test specific hypotheses, and those that do don’t always fully report the statistics or the process. Studies that include some hypothesis testing (with varying degrees of rigor) are:

• Gitta & Ikoja-Odongo (2003) — Reasons for using cybercafes, relationship between education and internet use
• Miller (2004) — Statistical significance of findings on gender, occupation and location of infoplazas
• Wahid, Furuholt, & Kristiansen (2004) — Several hypotheses about the characteristics of early adopters of internet cafes (users and investors)

CITATION
Sey, Araba. 2008. Public Access to ICTs: A Review of the Literature. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Center for Information & Society (CIS)