Impact of Information Society Research in the Global South

Arul Chib is the Director of SiRC and Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University. He studies mobile phones in healthcare (mHealth) and transnational migration. He has over 100 research publications and conference presentations. Dr. Chib won the 2011 Prosper.NET-Scopus Award for the use of ICTs for sustainable development, accompanied by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has been awarded fellowships at Ludwig Maxmilians University and University of Southern California. He serves on the editorial boards of Human Communication Research, Communication Yearbook, and Mobile Media and Communication, and is Senior Editor of The Electronic journal for Information Systems in Developing Countries. Dr. Chib’s research in as many as nine countries has been profiled in the media, ranging from the United Nations Chronicle to the Singaporean press. He has lectured at numerous global events and presented the keynote speech at the Media Health Communication Conference 2012 in Munich. He is the General Conference Chair for ICTD2015, and a member of the organizing committees of the IFIP 8.6 2013 and ICTD 2012. Julian D. May is Professor in the Institute for Social Development at the University of Western Cape. He has worked on poverty reduction policy options and systems for monitoring the impact of policy, including social security grants and land reform in Southern and East Africa and in the Indian Ocean Islands. He is a Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute, the Comparative Research Program on Poverty, the Department of Social Policy at Oxford University and the South African Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town. In August 2009, he was awarded a South African Research Chair in Applied Poverty Reduction Assessment by the National Research Foundation. He has edited 3 books, published over 60 papers in books and academic journals, and produced more than 120 working papers, research reports and other publications. Roxana Barrantes (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is General Director and Senior Researcher at Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Professor at the Department of Economics of Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP). She is a member of the Steering Committee of DIRSI, member of the Advisory Committee for LACEEP (Latin America and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program), and Advisory Committee member of the Master’s Program in Business Law at PUCP. A former member of the Peruvian Telecommunications Regulator Board of Directors, Dr. Barrantes has served as Advisor and Consultant to other Regulatory Agencies in Peru, the Ombudsman Office, and IADB.

Foreword.- Chapter 1: Research on Impact of the Information Society in the Global South: An Introduction to SIRCA.- Part I: Impact of Research.- Chapter 2. The Impact of Research on Development Policy and Practice: This Much We Know.- Chapter 3: Constructing Theories of Change for Information Society Impact Research.- Chapter 4: A New Set of Questions: ICT4D Research and Policy.- Chapter 5: Progress Towards Resolving the Measurement Link Between ICT and Poverty Reduction.- Chapter 6: The Impact of mFinance Initiatives in the Global South: A Review of the Literature.- Chapter 7: An Analytical Framework to Incorporate ICT as an Independent Variable.- Part II: Research on Impact.- Chapter 8: (Un)Balanced Conversations: Participatory Action Research in Technology Development in Peruvian Primary Schools.- Chapter 9: The Institutional Dynamics Perspective of ICT for Health Initiatives in India.- Chapter 10: Cybersex as Affective Labour: Critical Interrogations of the Philippine ICT Framework and the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012.- Chapter 11: The Internet and Indonesian Women Entrepreneurs: Examining the Impact of Social Media on Women Empowerment.- Chapter 12. The Use of Mobile Communication in the Marketing of Foodstuffs in Côte d’Ivoire.- Chapter 13: Designing Web 2.0 Tools for Online Public Consultation.- Chapter 14: ICTs and Opinion Expression: An Empirical Study of New Generation Migrant Workers in Shanghai.- Chapter 15: Impact of Research or Research on Impact: More Than a Matter of Semantics and Sequence