From needs to aspirations in information technology for development

Kentaro Toyama

Information Technology for Development, 2018, vol. 24, issue 1, 15-36

Abstract: “Needs” figure prominently both in the technology sector and in international development. Both fields refer frequently to people’s needs and perform needs assessments. But, the two groups differ on what needs are. The technologist’s conception is represented in such statements as, “the user needs to see shoes in various colors on an e-commerce website.” Development focuses on more basic needs such as nutrition, health, and employment. We argue that conflating these two classes of needs is a subtle but underlying cause of myopic technological interventions. While development is increasingly understood to require changes in human capital, institutional capacity, and mass values – traits internal to people and societies – the technologist’s conception of needs suggests solutions that change external context through technological artifacts. We propose an approach to ICT and development that is focused less on needs, and more on aspirations. We rationalize aspirations as a basis for action, and present preliminary evidence in the form of a survey and three brief case studies for the viability of aspiration-based approaches to development.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02681102.2017.1310713 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:titdxx:v:24:y:2018:i:1:p:15-36

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/titd20

DOI: 10.1080/02681102.2017.1310713

Access Statistics for this article

Information Technology for Development is currently edited by Sajda Qureshi

More articles in Information Technology for Development from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().