The Organisational Context for Successful ICT4D Practitioners

How can their organisational context best support those who implement ICT4D projects?

People – designers, builders, operators, champions – are critical to the successful implementation of ICT4D projects.  The digital development organisations that employ these practitioners already know that.  But what they know far less about is how to create a supportive organisational context that will improve ICT4D practitioner performance and, hence, ICT4D project success rates.

I have therefore been undertaking field research in East Africa designed to tease out components of supportive context, based on interviews in five organisations which were a mix of NGOs and social enterprises.  To date, I have identified six “habits of highly-effective digital development organisations”:

1. Reinforcing Mission Congruence

The most-effective contexts were those in which ICT4D practitioners were given a clear sense of how their work fitted with the organisation’s wider mission, which typically related to social impact.  As well as giving practitioners the bigger picture of their contribution, this also helped create a unity of purpose with shared goals of making a difference.

2. Strong Non-Monetary Rewards

Money is tight in most digital development organisations but they can successfully motivate their practitioners with non-monetary rewards.  Flexibility on working hours and opportunities for work-life balance came up repeatedly in this category, alongside recognition from peers of one’s contribution.

3. Involvement in Monetary Reward-Setting

A role for non-monetary rewards does not mean money is unimportant – it is!  But just as important as the amount was the process by which pay was calculated.  Supportive contexts were those where pay was transparently calculated and openly discussed, and hence where ICT4D practitioners felt involved in the process of decision-making.

4. Support for Career Progression

To make their best contribution to ICT4D projects, practitioners needed to feel that they were making progress in their careers.  Though often backed by direct mentoring, organisational support here varied by career stage.  Early-career practitioners had a strong perceived need for skills development: not narrow task-specific skills but a broad and hybrid mix of technical and non-technical capabilities.  This worked best where their organisation offered them a mix of different roles but also ensured access to high-quality digital tools and infrastructure.  Mid-career professionals also wanted growth opportunities but they focused less on technical skills and more on being given the autonomy and responsibility to develop leadership capabilities.

5. Meeting Personal Goals

ICT4D practitioners give their best to their projects and their organisation when they have a perception of reciprocation; particularly in terms of being helped to achieve their personal goals.  Goals of social impact and skills-building for career progression were mentioned already, but supportive contexts could provide other things – networks of stakeholder relations to build social capital for the future, and facilitation of personal development projects.

6. Socio-Emotional Support

ICT4D often has a technical bias but practitioners worked best in cultures attuned to the human side of work, and in which they felt their whole selves were recognised.  These were organisations that were more like “families” than “well-oiled machines”; in which peers and managers cared about wellbeing and would take time to listen and engage with personal problems; and in which socialisation and hence a sense of belonging were actively encouraged.

These findings may themselves have some specificity to East African digital development organisations.  Each organisation may thus need to identify the dimensions of organisational support that will work with its particular ICT4D practitioners.  Nonetheless, these six habits should be a useful starting point for all organisations.

If you would like further details about the six habits, or my ongoing work using these to develop interventions for digital development organisations, then feel free to contact me: epiphania.kimaro[@]manchester.ac.uk

Photo credit: Gladness Mayenga

Why is it Important to Know about the Origins of ICT4D Champions?

At the most recent gathering of information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) scholars in the North of England I asked how important and significant it is to research the origins of champions and leaders in international development. Understanding the origins of key development actors appeared to be a pressing matter to me when researching ICT4D champions[i] in South Africa: it seemed unlikely that one could proactively identify, deploy, develop and support such individuals without understanding their genesis. However, I felt uncertain about the extent research colleagues share this sense of significance. ICT4D North (of England) provided a great opportunity to ask colleagues for their opinions about this issue.

Those attending my 10 minute talk were requested to consider how significant they think understanding the factors contributing to someone becoming an ICT4D champion are and to indicate their assessment on a scale of 1 to 10 before I shared my arguments.

I continued to reason that understanding the origins of ICT4D champion is very significant based on the following three perspectives:

A conceptual perspective on the nature of development

Champions and leaders are included within development conceptualisations around agency – the capacity of individual actors to act on behalf of themselves or others towards increased well-being and development.

Consider the recent Information Technology for Development journal special issue, ‘Conceptualizing Development in ICT4D’: all seven contributions – one way or the other – included an emphasis on agency in their framing of development. Authors of three papers in the special issue were present at ICT4D North, so this observation was illuminated from those sources:

1) Jimenez and Zheng examined the relationship between innovation and development and argued for the importance of the individual’s agency therein, hence a human-development perspective;

2) Poveda and Roberts argued for the importance of agency to challenge structural root causes of unjust social norms, hence a social justice perspective on development through critical-agency;

3) Ismail et al. framed development from an institutional perspective and, amongst other things, showed the importance of spokespersons – lead agents – for the marginalised in impact sourcing initiatives.

As such, understanding the various roles of actors – including leaders such as champions and others – and the factors that shape their agency, cannot be omitted from a development research agenda, because it is so central to our understanding of the concept ‘development’.

A perspective on international development project performance

International aid and development initiatives are most often delivered by means of projects. Unfortunately these projects have an uneven success track record. Tangible, broad-based evidence is elusive but to illustrate, the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group project performance ratings[ii] indicated a failure rate of 50% until 2000 and 39% to 2010.

ICT4D projects perform no better, with less than 20% of initiatives considered successful and as many as a third being outright failures[iii]. Interestingly, from a cross-cutting analysis of critical success factors for information systems projects[iv] it was found that the top three most prevalent drivers of success were people factors – issues such as facilitation of participation, sponsorship and competence building; these are all leadership-related aspects.

How significant are leaders and leadership in mainstream development discourses? To get a clearer sense of this I examined World Development – the largest and most impactful development studies journal[v]. On average, only one article that empirically examines leaders and leadership in development was published annually over the last 20 years. This seems disproportionate to the acknowledged importance of key individuals in development practice and is inadequate to progressively build knowledge in this area. Understanding the role and nature of leading actors – such as champions and other leaders – is critically important in order to succeed with development projects, yet inadequately addressed through development research, including a better grasp of their roots.

A champion-specific perspective

The literature on the origins of champions is somewhat of an enigma. We analysed a core set of systematically selected research papers about champions of information systems innovations[vi] to gain insight into current perspectives. This analysis revealed four prevailing concepts of champion origins from which two axes can be derived:

• Born vs. made: some authors argue that becoming a champion is the result of an innate predisposition. While context and external interventions may impact the likelihood that this predisposition is expressed in champion behaviour, it does not alter that predisposition. The key task for organisations, therefore, is identification of those who have a champion’s profile. Others argue that (almost) anyone can become a champion through appropriate development and training: these, rather than profiling exercises, thus become the focus of organisational intervention.
• Emergent vs. appointed: some authors see champions as naturally emerging within any project or situation of innovation. These individuals take an interest in a particular cause and then begin to champion it. Organisations may affect this via general contextual interventions, but they would not get directly involved at the level of the individual. Others argue that one needs to plan the presence of champions: individuals must be identified, sometimes explicitly assigned the role of champion, before championing can begin.

My empirical research of ICT4D champions establishes that the factors leading to someone becoming a champion extend beyond these. Origins are affected by a mix of contingency factors – environmental factors, social networks, personal characteristics, organisational factors, skills and education, and personal experiences – that influence them over a longitudinal time period, during which a trigger – an opportunity, experience, or a new technology – catalyses a person into actively championing a specific cause, innovation or ICT4D initiative. So, the inadequacy of our current understanding provides the impetus to further explore the role and nature of key agents – leaders such as champions and others – in ICT4D projects, including a better grasp of their genesis.

In sum, I argue, from these three perspectives, that our current understanding of leading actors – such as ICT4D champions – is inadequate. Considering these issues around agency in development, it is contended that current champions in ICT4D are incidental, because we have insufficient understanding of the origins of champions. Better understanding of the origins of champions is significant because it is the necessary first step to proactively identify, develop, deploy and support such individuals in our initiatives. Ultimately this could lead to more successful development in practice.

ICT4D North participants were then asked to revisit their initial assessment after I shared my arguments, thereby examining the persuasiveness of my narratives. Here are some of the responses:

Here are lessons I’ve learned from their feedback:

• The conceptual links between agency, leaders and champions should be further developed and clarified.
• The notion of ‘origins of a champion’ invokes a connotation of ‘place of origin’ as opposed to a more holistic interest in all the factors that play a role in a champion’s formation[i].
• It was encouraging to see an upwards trajectory in participants’ perceptions about the significance of the topic after considering my arguments. This should be strengthened in future work by attending to the lessons learned here.

Huge thanks to all participants who attended the ICT4D North (of England) second annual workshop hosted by the University of Sheffield!

[i] For an introduction to what we have learned so far about ICT4D champion origins see: Renken, J. C. & Heeks, R. B. (2017). A Conceptual Framework of ICT4D Champion Origins. 14th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries (IFIP WG 9.4). Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

[i] For a definition of ICT4D champions see: Renken, J. C. & Heeks, R. B. (2013). Conceptualising ICT4D Project Champions. The 6^th International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development. Cape Town, South Africa.

[ii] World Bank Independent Evaluation Group. (2015). IEG World Bank project performance ratings. Washington, DC: The World Bank

[iii] Heeks, R. (2003). Most E-government-for-Development Projects Fail : How can Risks be Reduced? Manchester: Institute for Development Policy and Management.

[iv] Broader in scope than ICT4D projects by including developed country data, see: Irvine, R. & Hall, H. (2015). Factors, Frameworks and Theory: A Review of the Information Systems Literature on Success Factors in Project Management. Information Research, 20(3), 1-46.

[v] Based on: McKenzie, D. (2017). ‘The State of Development Journals 2017: Quality, Acceptance Rates, and Review Times’, Development Impact, 21 February 2017, Available at: https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/state-development-journals-2017-quality-acceptance-rates-and-review-times

[vi] Renken, J. C. & Heeks, R. B. (2014). Champions of Information System Innovations: Thematic Analysis and Future Research Agenda. UK Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS) International Conference. Oxford, UK.

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Can a Process Approach Improve ICT4D Project Success?

Many ICT4D projects fail[1].  There are various mooted reasons for this, of which I will highlight five here:

• Failure to involve beneficiaries and users: those who can ensure that project designs are well-matched to local realities.
• Rigidity in project delivery: following a pre-planned approach such as that mandated by methods like Structured Systems Analysis and Design Methodology, or narrow use of LogFrames.
• Failure to learn: not incorporating lessons from experience that arises either before or during the ICT4D project.
• Ignoring local institutional capacities: not making use of good local institutions where they already exist or not strengthening those which could form a viable support base.
• Ineffective project leadership: that is unable to direct and control the ICT4D project.

This does not represent an exhaustive list of causes but one can find one or more of them in many failed ICT4D projects.  And they are deliberately selected because – if we turn them around to their mirror-image project enablers – they become the five key components of the “process approach” to development projects: beneficiary participation; flexible and phased implementation; learning from experience; local institutional support; and sound project leadership.

The process approach arose during the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction to the top-down, “blueprint” approach[2].  The blueprint approach was particularly associated with use of foreign technologies in rural development projects.  Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that it has filtered through into ICT4D practice.

Equally, though, one can see elements of the process approach in action in successful ICT4D projects:

• Beneficiary participation: the M-PESA mobile finance project in Kenya incorporated the views of users into project design through user trials and volunteer focus groups.
• Flexible and phased implementation: India’s agricultural information kiosk project, e-Choupal, used a pilot approach for all new services; introducing them one-by-one and planning designs and scale-up on the basis of those pilots.
• Learning from experience: Grameen incorporated the lessons from its microfinance projects into the design and delivery of its Grameen Phone programme of rural mobile telephony.
• Local institutional support: Brazil’s community computing project, the Committee to Democratise Informatics, is founded on the development of local institutional capacity through each of the schools it creates.
• Sound project leadership: returning to M-PESA again, Vodafone put skilled project managers in place in Kenya in order to make the project work.

Each one of these projects – and one can no doubt find many others within the ICT4D field – demonstrates more than one of these five elements.  This is not unexpected since the process approach can be understood not as five rather arbitrarily-categorised, separate components but as an integrated whole.  It can be conceived like a wheel (see figure below[3]): flexible, phased implementation being the tyre that absorbs the bumps as the project goes along, feeding contextual information to learning from experience: the central axle from which the spokes of participation, local institutions and leadership radiate, giving strength to the whole.

 Figure 1: The ICT4D Process Approach Wheel

The process approach also reconceives the notion of success in ICT4D projects.  Instead of seeing either success or failure as cross-sectional, final judgements on a project, instead – like a point on the rolling wheel – any judgement must be seen as contingent and passing.  Instead of success and failure, we would therefore talk of multiple “successes” and “failures” as the project proceeds.  Any overall judgement would rest on relevance of the ICT4D solution, opportunities for capacity building, and sustainability.  A process approach contributes to each of these.

And for ICT4D practitioners, a process approach can help pose questions:

• What is the role of beneficiaries throughout the project’s stages?
• What is the mechanism for changing direction on the project when something unforeseen occurs?
• What is the basis for learning on the project?
• What local institutions can be used for project support?
• What is the nature of project leadership?

And so forth – these and other questions can lead to concrete plans, schedules and roles which incorporate the lessons of the process approach into future ICT4D activities.

This blog entry is a summary of the online working paper “Can a Process Approach Improve ICT4D Project Success?“, published in the University of Manchester’s Development Informatics series.

If you have experiences of ICT4D project failure or success to share, please do so via comments.

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[1] Good data on success/failure of ICT4D projects is embarrassingly limited, and more historical than recent.  See: “Information Systems and Developing Countries: Failure, Success and Local Improvisation”

[2] A foundational paper is David Korten’s article “Community Organization and Rural Development: A Learning Process Approach”

[3] Source: Bond, R. & Hulme, D. (1999). Process Approaches to Development: Theory and Sri Lankan Practice. World Development, 27(8), 1339-1358