Ital Lives in G Hana, Kenya, and U G and A

in Ghana, Digital lives Kenya, and Uganda Digital lives in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda The following Caribou Digital Authors wrote this report: Savita Bailur, Jonathan Donner, Chris Locke, Emrys Schoemaker, and Charlotte Smart. Recommended Citation: Caribou Digital, Digital Lives in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda (Farnham, Surrey, United Kingdom: Caribou Digital Publishing, 2015. www.cariboudigital.net Contents 02 Executive summary 12 Chapter 1 Introduction and framing 22 Chapter 2 Crosscutting themes in digitally enabled development 36 Chapter 3 Use in context: Voices from users 58 Chapter 4 Discussion: Digital Days 80 Appendix 1: Supporting materials 98 Appendix 2: Literature review 02 Executive summary Digital lives in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda 03 Executive summary In the last decade, the boom in mobile phone access and Specifically, we argue that development programs with use around the world has been nothing short of astounding, an eye on instrumental outcomes are well-served by mobile/cellular devices have become not only nearly the cultivation of an understanding of broader digital ubiquitous replacements for traditional fixed line telephones, practices—of people’s increasingly digital lives. This work but also the most widespread means of accessing the explores not only what devices people use, but also how Internet itself. they get online and what they do once there. These representations of digital practices must be fluid and There are burgeoning literatures emerging around this current, given the rapidly changing landscape of Internet boom. Some focus on the uses of digital technologies in connectivity and digital services, and must identify specific purposive ways “for” development: for example, opportunities for new inclusive business models and exploring applications in mobile health, mobile learning, behavioral interventions. mobile money, even mobile agriculture and mobile government. Other efforts look more broadly, capturing the Therefore, this report contributes to the evidence base for wide range of human activities mediated by digital development practice and for theory in several ways. technologies, from flirting to entertainment, sharing to 1 • Chapter One offers a sketch of Caribou Digital’s three- religion. In this report we distinguish these frames as the part overarching approach to understanding emerging difference between “instrumental” and “non-instrumental” digital practices in context, with an eye specifically on uses of technologies. bridging the gaps between development and daily life, This is, therefore, a moment of profound change for the and between the micro-level perspective of individual community of practice for those who would seek to use users and the macro-level forces impacting the landscape digital technologies in the service of socioeconomic of digital resources available to them. development. Thanks to the mobile internet boom, the possibilities (and risks) of digital connection, consumption, • Chapter Two details results from extensive interviews and production computing are no longer limited to those with experts in the field of Information and with means to buy a PC, or those who can visit cybercafés in Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) libraries. The possibilities (and risks) are, instead, literally in that help place the current M4D wave in the context of the hands and pockets of a far greater array of people. Youth more durable past and future factors. and the poor, urban and rural, men and women, all are using mobile devices in increasingly dynamic and varied ways • In Chapter Three, our reports on new primary research in their own lives. Granted, and importantly, not all are with users in Uganda, Ghana, and Kenya yield a broader doing so with the same skill, or intensity, or effectiveness, and up-to-the-minute story of how mobile technologies but the shift to digital is underway even among are currently the center of users’ digital lives. resource-constrained communities. • Chapter Four concludes the report with a synthesis With these new digital practices come new opportunities of these two streams, suggesting that our portrayal and challenges for traditional domains of development of users’ “Digital Days” can provide a user-centric practice; to be more effective, these domains (for example, lens to understand how technologies and practices agriculture, education, livelihoods, health, and participation) are intertwined, how they vary between contexts, must adapt to the changing landscape of communication and how they might enable and structure and digital connection. Such adaptations require up-to-the- development interventions. minute insights about technology use in practice. It is in that spirit of open inquiry that this work was commissioned. Through dialogues with technology experts and with interviews with users in three countries, this research project explores how everyday practices around digital technologies—particularly mobile technologies— are changing, and how the development community might begin to take greater advantage of these changes. 1 Jonathan Donner, “Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature,” The Information Society 24, no. 3 (2008): 140—59, doi:10.1080/01972240802019970. Digital lives in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda 04 Executive summary continued The Study We use the term Internet Access Modalities to represent the particular configurations of technologies, business This report has been prepared in partnership with 2 models, industry players, regulatory frameworks in place The MasterCard Foundation, a philanthropic foundation to connect Internet users, via devices, over “last mile” focused on promoting education, skills training, and networks, to the services and systems on the broader global financial services for people living in poverty, primarily in Internet. When described this way, the most dominant Sub-Saharan Africa. Although we have conducted our Internet Access Modality—by far—is mobile handsets using research keeping The MasterCard Foundation in mind as a cellular wireless protocol (like Edge, 3G, or LTE) to access the central audience for the findings, the results presented the Internet via Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). The here are intended to be read by and useful to a wider range same user would encounter a different modality when she of practitioners and researchers in ICT4D and development. comes in range of a Wi-Fi hotspot at a local community 3 center. The affordances of the modality shift as she Caribou Digital is a consultancy, founded in 2014, focused transitions from a pay-by-the-bit plan with her MNO to on projects that promote the strengthening of inclusive a free 30 minutes offered by the center, even if the device digital economies in emerging markets. We do this by is unchanged. Her modality might shift again if she goes research, advisory, and delivery work with our partners. We inside and sits down at a shared-access PC. In each case, have decades of experience across the telecommunications the affordances of the modality will create different industry, development practice, and academia, and as a Internet experiences. result, have a particular perspective on ICT4D and the shift to a digital world. Some of that perspective is in evidence in Switching to the user level, we use the holistic term this document. Digital Repertoires to stress how individuals, households, and organizations are not passive “beneficiaries” or The MasterCard Foundation engaged Caribou Digital to “audiences” in the shift to a digital world; but rather are undertake the research activities supporting this project— active participants, choosing, appropriating, and adapting literature reviews, expert interviews, and the focus groups platforms, content, services, and technologies in the ways and interviews with users in Sub-Saharan Africa—between that work best for them. One element of user choice involves April and September 2015. toggling between available Internet Access Modalities, but Summary of Findings by Chapter practice is much broader than that, including also the skills, incentives, routines, and habits that each individual brings The remaining sections of this executive summary address to her repertoire. the main points of each chapter, in turn. Finally, there is a crosscutting force influencing both the Theoretical Approach shape of available Internet Access Modalities and the We say this emphatically: the digital opportunity has never patterns of user repertoires. These Platforms are the large been and will never be exclusively about handsets, mobile international information technology companies that have phone calls, or text messages. Mobile is best understood come to dominate the consumer (and therefore the global) as an important part of a broader tapestry of information Internet. Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, technologies, which includes everything from media and a few others offer a host of interconnected services, production and satellite infrastructures through to the exchange technologies, partnerships, and business models that operate of USB sticks at a market stall and shared-access telecentres. across myriad devices and networks, binding together people’s identities and experiences across multiple domains To capture some of these contexts and interconnections, into proprietary platform ecosystems. These platforms have Caribou Digital has developed an integrated approach become global giants in large part because they underpin bringing together three

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