A Deeply Embedded Sociotechnical Strategy for Designing ICT for Development

Development is a social phenomenon. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are a technical phenomenon. Therefore, ICT for development is inescapably a socio-technical phenomenon. For this reason, ICT design efforts that frame themselves with development objectives, require an analysis of their intervention strategies in explicitly socio-technical terms. In this paper, the authors reflect on the strategies adopted by the Rural e-Services project, which has been working with a co-operative of marginal farmers in rural India to design new software and new practices using mobile camera phones to communicate with their agricultural advisors. By combining approaches from participatory development practice and participatory methods of ICT design, the project was able to manage a sustainable socio-technical reconfiguration of the operations of the co-operative.