Development of the surveys has been a difficult process of trade-offs. Most people who have participated in surveys on ICT use can probably identify with the feeling that these surveys are often extremely long, some taking up to two hours to complete. And researchers will admit that once the data is collected, a large proportion of it goes unused, it is never analyzed. We’ve had to make some difficult choices about the scope of our surveys of public access ICT venue users and operators. There are several relevant issues that we would like to explore, from the demographics of public access users to the impact of usage on users’ health, education and participation in civic life. The first draft of the user survey compiled over 60 pages of questions on several of these interesting issues - a survey that could potentially take more than three hours to complete. Since our goal is to keep the surveys less than one hour long, we needed a systematic approach to decide which questions would be included in the final version. To do this we prioritized the research questions we would investigate with the surveys, developed hypotheses to go with each research question, and identified potential indicators to test each hypothesis. This process enabled us to select questions for the instruments that are directly related to our research questions, and provided a means to make the hard decisions of eliminating questions that are “interesting” but fall out of the scope we have defined for the surveys.

The research questions for the surveys are:

1. What is the demographic profile of public access ICT users?
2. Apart from public access ICTs, what other information and communication resources do public access ICT users have?
3. How do public access ICT users perceive their ICT skills and what are their ICT use comfort levels?
4. Why do people go to public access ICT venues?
5. What do people do at public access ICT venues?
6. How accessible are public access ICT venues and services to different types of populations?
7. How do the design, services, and operations of public access ICTs affect usage patterns?
8. What types of venue policies do public access ICT operators view as inhibiting their ability to provide information and services that they believe users want?
9. What do public access users see as the impacts of using public access?
10. What outcomes can be associated with public access ICT use in different domains?
11. Does public access ICT use have indirect impacts?
12. What is the value of public access ICT to users?
13. What is the cost of providing public access ICTs?

The survey instruments are in the final stages of editing before being translated into local languages and piloted. Results from the pilots will inform the final survey instruments, which will be rolled out in early 2010 in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, and the Philippines. We are looking forward to sharing the final instruments and additional insights about our survey development process.

Since we were trying to design an inventory data collection tool that would be usable in multiple countries, the effort required several months of collaboration amongst project members to reach agreement on issues such as what types of data to include in the inventory; definitions of telecenters, internet cafés and libraries; and how to account for unique features of public access ICT venues in different countries. For example, some people describe telecenters as  donor or publicly-funded computing venues that provide free access to computers, while others define telecenters by their mission, that is, whether they have social rather than economic goals.

It has taken about 12 months to complete this process and we will have four distinct outputs:

1. A taxonomy that provides a common language for categorizing public access venues across countries
2. A template for data collection with detailed instructions
3. A database containing inventory data from Bangladesh, Chile and Lithuania
4. A report describing our experience in developing the inventory and some preliminary descriptive analyses of the data

Following our open research data approach, the database will be accessible online after the data have been cleaned and our researchers have had the opportunity to perform some analyses of the data. First versions of the inventory guidelines and data collection template are now available to anyone interested in replicating our process. We hope this tool will be useful to others performing similar activities. The first set of data for Bangladesh, Chile, and Lithuania will be available in early 2010. Research teams in Brazil and the Philippines will begin data collection by January 2010, and their data should be accessible in mid 2010.

Download the inventory guidelines and spreadsheet.

Our next steps are to finish cleaning the data, test the database, and develop a system to enable yearly updating of the data by researchers in each country.

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.

The study asks:

• Do people gain any ICT skills (i.e., keyboarding skills, knowledge of operating systems and file structures, etc.) through non-instrumental uses of ICTs?
• Are any skills gained through non-instrumental uses transferable to other (instrumental) uses of ICTs (i.e., searching strategies, information evaluation, synthesis and summary)?
• How do the characteristics and consumption patterns of non-instrumental use differ between public and private access points?
• How do user’s understandings of and attitudes towards ICTs differ between public access sites where the emphasis is on consumption of information versus the creation of content and multimedia?
• How do the characteristics of users affect skill level and activity choice in public access sites?

It’s important to look at public access venues (such as libraries and telecentres) because they are different from private access points (such as home computers). Many public spaces explicitly create collaborative or learning environments as part of their social mission — but in doing so they may also prohibit or discourage non-instrumental use.

This two-year study (2009–2011), led by Beth Kolko, includes fieldwork in Chile and Brazil. Fieldwork will consist of venue and user observations, user and operator interviews, computer skills assessments for users, and a case study on creating content and multimedia at a telecenter in Brazil. Our hypotheses:

1. Novice and experienced users engage in a mix of instrumental and non-instrumental uses of ICT.
2. Because of the surveillance aspects of public use, as well as policies that are in place at certain centers that may encourage or discourage non-instrumental use, the type of non-instrumental uses may differ (with regard to frequency, volume, visibility) in public versus private spaces.
3. Engaging in communication and entertainment activities results in users gaining computer skills, cognitive abilities, content knowledge, and other potential skills.
4. The computer skills gained through non instrumental uses transfer to instrumental uses of ICTs.
5. Public engagement with ICTs for non instrumental uses leverage collaborative shared space, and thus emphasizes specific kind of skills — skills that transfer to other areas of life, including those domains mentioned in the Global Impact Study.
6. Having an opportunity to create multimedia gives people different skill sets than just consuming media, and it also gives them a different sense of themselves as agents and participants in a knowledge and technological society.
7. Some demographic characteristics may affect skill acquisition.

People are more likely to use computers in telecenters, libraries, and cybercafés for social and entertainment purposes than for anything else. (See our Literature Review.) If such non-instrumental uses promote general ICT skill acquisition, the fact that traditional instruments or measurements do not investigate these non-instrumental usage patterns may have hindered our understanding of how people acquire ICT skills that then have impact on their lives.

Browse non-instrumental use updates »

The two-year study (2009–2011) will be led by Michael Best, along with Beth Kolko and François Bar, and supported by Mark Davies in Ghana. Researchers will visit a dozen public access venues in Ghana — large and small, rural and urban, upscale and relatively modest — to identify when sharing enhances or diminishes a user’s experience as compared to individual use (at a public access venue) or private use (at home). Download the full research proposal.

The study’s mixed-method approach will include broad survey work (including working with the national surveys), focused ethnographic-inspired research at a few venues, quantitative methods, natural and formal experiments, and ultimately system and space design exercises. It will examine five hypotheses:

1. End-user co-present space sharing (i.e., people occupy the space together but have their own computers) enhances the outcomes/impacts of computer use in many cases.
2. End-user co-present technology sharing (i.e., people occupy the space together and also share a single computer) enhances the outcomes/impacts of computer use in many cases.
3. End-users will share at times equipment even in the presence of abundance in order to satisfy individual interests or social norms.
4. The architecture, rules, and norms of the public access space influence the ability of people to engage in end-user co-present space sharing. These spaces can be designed to encourage the best sort of sharing.
5. The code of technologies influences the ability of people to engage in end-user co-present technology sharing. These computer technologies can be designed to encourage the best sort of sharing.

Ultimately, the research team’s goal is to understand end-user sharing in public facilities while innovating upon potential designs, policies, and architectures that support and enhance the best forms of collaborative use.

Browse collaborative knowledge-sharing updates »

Led by Ricardo Ramirez, with Balaji Parthasarathy and Andy Gordon, this study asks four main questions:

1. What are the practices, skills, and attitudes exhibited by infomediaries across different types of public access venues (libraries, telecentres, and cybercafes) and job descriptions (formal versus informal)?
2. What outcomes do patrons provide as evidence of a positive experience from using a public access venue (across sectors like health, education, finance, job, democratic engagement)?
3. To what extent do users point at infomediaries’ practices, roles, skills, attitudes as contributors to their positive or negative experiences, outcomes, and motivation to use public access venues (and how do they vary across sectors)?
4. Under what conditions are infomediaries most able to contribute to positive impact in terms of effective use and improved information ecologies?

Through focus groups and semi-structured interviews, the research team will identify specific mechanisms, contexts, and conditions that allow infomediaries to broker the needs of users. Fieldwork in Bangladesh, Chile, and Lithuania starts on October 1, 2009, and will continue through 2011. The study’s hypotheses:

• The different practices and roles played by infomediaries will influence the impact of public access venues on users. This includes infomediaries’ skills and attitudes, the extent to which their jobs are formalized, the type of venue they work in, and the rules they improvise as gatekeepers.
• The context and type of public access venue where infomediaries perform their work will influence the reach and effectiveness of the services.  The context includes: information ecology, policies, pricing of services, and trust issues across the different types of public access venues.
• The impact of the infomediaries will vary across patrons’ different livelihood priorities, including health, education, finances, jobs, democratic engagement, etc.

The Infomediaries study’s findings will be helpful to governments, donors, and investors involved in policy debates about the merits of public access venues. For the library community, the findings will provide insights into staff attributes, training, motivation, working conditions, and support needs.

Browse infomediaries updates »

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.

Amy Mahan (1961–2009)

Amy Mahan served on the Global Impact Study’s Research Working Group since the project’s inception a year and a half ago. She made key contributions to the conception and design of our research effort, helped shape its focus, hypotheses and methodology.

Throughout her work, most notably as a leader of the Learning Initiative on Reforms for Network Economies (LIRNE.net), Amy saw public access to information technology first and foremost as an instrument for social and economic inclusion. She dedicated her life and scholarship to understanding how information and communication technologies could best enable excluded people, women in particular, to improve their lives and strengthen their communities. In her passion for helping others, Amy believed that action had to go hand-in-hand with research and that effective programs could only be built upon solid understanding rooted in rigorous study. As it emerges from its formative first year, the Global Impact Study reflects Amy’s commitment and owes a great debt to her insights.

Amy left us on March 5th, 2009, at age 47. She worked with us until the end and left suddenly, taking many of her friends and colleagues by surprise. Amy had told very few people about her cancer, refusing to let the illness define her and, we suspect, fearful this might have distracted us from focusing on a project she cared very much about. She wanted to be remembered instead by her ideas, her scholarship, her dedication to help others. As we move forward, we will do our best to honor her memory by making sure the Global Impact Study remains true to her beliefs and worthy of her high standards. Plans are also underway, in coordination with other IDRC research programs in which she played key roles, to create a research fellowship in Amy’s name.

Country Research Teams collected data on several public access venues, looking at user groups and activities, venue characteristics, and the roles venues play in each community. This data provides a snapshot of regional information ecologies — community networks of trusted information sources. It will be used to refine the Global Impact Study’s research design, and will be helpful in formulating research questions and hypotheses.

Each of the three Country Research Teams conducted individual interviews, group interviews, and non-participant observation at six to nine public access venues — including public libraries, cybercafes, and telecenters in rural and urban locations. What follows here are a few highlights.

Inconsistent usage trends

Usage trends for venues providing public access to ICT are not consistent across countries. In recent years, Bangladesh saw a growing number of users, most prominently among telecenters, while Lithuania experienced declines, due in part to rising home computers purchases. Staff in Lithuania, however, reported that the range of users — by age, occupation, and social status — has simultaneously grown. All three research teams, including the team in Chile, found that the user base in telecenters and libraries tends to be more diverse than in commercially-oriented cybercafes.

Public access venues often fulfill social functions

In Lithuania, where the majority of users have Internet access at home or school, supplemental access in telecenters and public libraries is often for social purposes. Older users may appreciate having a public space for communication and exchange. Children may visit public access venues to play games or work on homework together. In such instances, the benefits of public access may be measured by the benefits of public use as opposed to private use.

In Chile, researchers noted differences in users’ perceptions between the roles of community-oriented and commercially-oriented venues. Community-oriented venues are perceived to be in contact with the community, local mass media, churches, adults and youngsters associations — serving their information, communication, and leisure needs. Commercially oriented venues are perceived as a service provider that does not building bridges within the community.

In Bangladesh, free Internet services and a wider offering of activities in libraries and telecenters build bonds, strengthen values, and create awareness about social issues. Pilot findings show that low-income users make up one-half of telecenter users and one-third of library users, in contrast to one-sixth of cybercafe users.

The social function of community-oriented libraries and telecenters may be more pronounced in rural settings or in communities with clear geographic and socio-economic boundaries. Chile’s Country Research Team found that

People living in these communities have shared feeling of belonging and therefore, public access venues also are perceived as part of this community. (Users refer to the venue as “our” venue). Commercially-oriented venues located in areas without defined socio-demographic boundaries, for example “downtown of the city”, even if they are immersed in a community, declare themselves as providing a service. (Users refer to the venue as “the” venue.)

Similarly, rural residents in Lithuania using the Internet in public access venues are reportedly more likely to perceive themselves as local community members and be more active in community activities.

Two Bangladeshi women and their mobile phone repair shop in Kathalia, Narsinghi district

A few months ago, these two Bangladeshi women opened a mobile phone repair shop in the small village of Kathalia, Narsinghi district, a two-hour drive north of Dhaka. They are among the 22 women who graduated from a training workshop on cell phone servicing and information technology in January 2008. Another woman has also set up shop in a nearby village, while the remaining 19 repair phones in their homes, advertising their services with a sign on the road.

This was the first time such training was offered. Funding came from the Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM), and the Kathalia Sukher Disha Community Resource Centre organized the three-week course. Participants were selected from nearby villages (one per village). The goal was to provide poor women with skills that would allow them to make a living as technicians. Upon graduation, each received a basic toolkit, worth about Tk. 1,000 ($15), including a set of screwdrivers, small pliers, soldering iron and solder, a cleaning brush, a Chinese-made multitester (Sunwa YX-360TR), and a Bengla/English collection of mobile phones diagrams covering the handsets most commonly found in rural Bangladesh.

The pair decided to become business partners and rented a storefront in Kathalia for Tk. 3,000 ($45) for the whole year. They work in the shop eight hours a day, five days a week. In addition to phone repairs, they also use their mobile to sell phone calls to villagers. Altogether since starting five months ago, they have earned on average Tk. 1,500 ($23) per month, most of it from repairs. They say most phones can be fixed by opening and cleaning them, but they can also test individual components, order and install a replacement when needed.

They hope to expand their business soon by offering additional services. First, they plan to provide flexi load — Grameen’s instant recharge for pre-paid phones. They would also like to sell mobile accessories. They looked into becoming participants in the Grameen Village Phone Program, but found the start-up cost too high and decided against it.

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.

• An overview of ICTD impact assessments methods, approaches, and frameworks
• Descriptions of eleven impact assessment frameworks
• A bibliography summarizing 150 works on ICTD impact assessment, many drawn from case studies

A bibliography summarizes 150 assessments, mosty drawn from case studies. Heeks is professor at the Institute for Development Policy and Management of the University of Machester and a Global Impact Study partner.

Production of the 157-page compendium was sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). It is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, so that it can be freely accessed, shared, and adapted.

The primary output of the workshop was a shortlist of areas for in-depth studies to undertake at the beginning of phase two of the project. Workshop participants formed groups and drafted proposals for the studies. The groups are currently finalizing their proposals, with the first in-depth studies planned for early 2009.

Browse all in-depth study updates »