The Reordering of Everyday Life through Digital technologies During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This paper offers an exploration of everyday life during the Covid-19 pandemic in Bangladesh with a focus on how it has been reordered through commonplace digital technologies and services. We present findings from a qualitative field study. Themes emerging from the findings suggest that digital technologies have been important to the reordering of everyday life during the pandemic: videoconferencing have been instrumental in allowing urban residents to work from home, digital money has enabled workers in rural areas to continue financial transactions, and social media has been a source of news and rumours during the pandemic. However, the benefits of the digital reordering of everyday life are unevenly distributed. The themes emerging are used to frame a discussion of the notion of reordering compared to the concept of resilience within ICTD. © 2022 ACM.

EdTech: Why the project-based approach must change in order to contribute to system resilience.

This viewpoint article argues that there is an urgent need to reform the project-based EdTech approach in order to allow EdTech to contribute to the resilience of education systems in the aftermath of Covid-19. Looking at the contrast between the multiplication of EdTech pilot projects presented as a necessary step in a process that will eventually lead to scaled solutions and the lack of solutions that actually scale, the article highlights those long-standing issues perceived as most pressing by the actors involved in project-based EdTech initiatives. Their perspective and statements allow one to grasp how the EdTech project approach favors the setup of EdTech projects that are by design unscalable, driven by a utopian perception of scalability and instrumentalized in the name of a goal that is de facto only a branding. As a result, and despite the mobilization of tremendous resources, the EdTech project-based approach cannot be system-transformative.

The Effectiveness of Technology-based Intervention for Positive Behavioural Change to Promote Health Seeking Behaviour among Rural and Tribal Communities

In the last decade, mobile phones have quickly evolved from being a tool of communication to a key agent of social development because of its widespread reach in urban as well as rural areas, especially in the under-served communities. The underserved communities refer to populations which are disadvantaged because of their lack of ability to access care, ability to pay, ability to access comprehensive healthcare, or other disparities for reasons of race, caste, religion, gender, language group or social or economic status. Mobile phone-based information and communication technologies (ICTs) have proven to be significantly beneficial for this section of society and communities - those living in remote and media-dark areas, people who have mostly remained deprived of critical health-related information - by spreading awareness, facilitating interaction and engagement, which in turn leads to adapting of healthy practices, and strengthening a health-seeking behaviour among the target communities. The secondary effect of this change is clearly reflected in economic and social development as well as health indicators of these families. This paper evaluates the efficacy of the mobile phone-based intervention in spreading awareness about maternal and child health, during the time of COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when physical outreach by health workers to contact pregnant women and lactating mothers was significantly hindered due to restrictions in movement and face to face meetings. The digital media outreach mechanisms aided by ICTs proved to be a strong alternative in this scenario, which can be demonstrated by the wide uptake of this service among the target communities. © 2022 IEEE.

Fostering Engagement of Underserved Communities with Credible Health Information on Social Media

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated rapid top-down dissemination of reliable and actionable information. This presents unique challenges in engaging low-literate communities that live in poverty and lack access to the Internet. We describe the design and deployment of a voice-based social media platform, accessible over simple phones, for actively engaging such communities in Pakistan with reliable COVID information. We developed three strategies to overcome users' hesitation, mistrust, and skepticism in engaging with COVID content. Users were: (1) encouraged to listen to reliable COVID advisory, (2) incentivized to share authentic content with others, and (3) prompted to critically think about COVID-related information behaviors. Using a mixed-methods evaluation, we show that users approached with all three strategies had a significantly higher engagement with COVID content compared to others. We discuss how new designs of social media can enable users to engage with and propagate authentic information. © 2022 ACM.