Women’s entrepreneurship is a key driver of socio-economic empowerment in the Global South, yet patriarchal sociocultural contexts limit entrepreneur’s autonomy and, despite increasing attention to gender issues in HCI, shifting digital infrastructures cause privacy, security, and logistical challenges. We conduct 15 interviews with women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh who rely on digital technology, offering insight into who they are, their business and supply chains, technology use, and the gendered challenges of balancing work with family. We present women’s accounts of navigating in-person and online harassment and crime, including through payment platforms, and banking tools that legally enforce gender discrimination. We discuss how digital technology design must adapt to these pervasive issues and propose digital interventions to support developing their businesses and achieving financial independence. Our work contributes to understanding how HCI can take a transformative role in overcoming barriers and advancing mechanisms for women’s financial empowerment in the Global South.

HCI practitioners in development contexts utilize collaborative digital technologies for community engagement in international development, often mediated through platforms like social media, tele-conferencing, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). However, the lack of standardized representation approaches for these platforms impedes effective communication among stakeholders. We propose a unified graphical framework for characterizing and representing collaborative platforms, focusing on audio/voice-based engagements. Our framework segments community engagement sessions into engagement formats, characterizing them with preconditions, configurations, and outputs, and visualizes them using state machine-based representations. A field study demonstrates the framework's effectiveness in supporting stakeholder communication for real-life scenarios. We contribute to CSCW literature by providing a standardized approach that offers a common framework/language for discussing, developing, or reconfiguring collaborative platforms. Our findings show that this framework enables non-governmental organizations and researchers to navigate under-explored design spaces, enhancing the utilization of voice-based platforms for engaging distributed marginalized communities.

Driven by pragmatic, cost-related, and environmental factors, voice-based remote community engagement tools (such as Interactive Voice Response) are emerging as a key modality for engaging marginalized communities. These voice-based digital solutions offer new opportunities for distributed community engagement and empowerment, and the ability to capture, store, and access a wide range of different records (i.e., recordings, interactions and contextual metadata) associated with community engagements. This potential for large scale, distributed community record collection necessitates an understanding of inclusive and effective recordkeeping approaches for appraisal, documentation, preservation, and accessibility of different types of records (such as audio recordings, transcripts, reports, and observatory notes) related to voice-based community engagements. Through qualitative analysis of stakeholder focus group discussions with domestic workers (as marginalized community members) and NGOs working in the sector, we present valuable insights and recommendations for the development of recordkeeping approaches tailored to voice-based remote community engagement records.

Although listening to community voice is a core value in HCI4D, we have limited methods to capture the community voice of marginalized groups within disadvantaged communities. Working with NGOs and 24 marginalized women farmers in Bangladesh, we promoted psychological safety and empowerment through our configuration of the process. Our stakeholders decided to record and produce a radio-style audio recording that presented their counter-collective narratives for development projects. We reflect on this process using the Benefits of Community Voice framework to document rich insights into community contexts, lived experiences, local knowledge, and building trust and buy-in and through interviews with three NGO workers. We discuss the fundamental need of stakeholders for a safe place to share, the value of letting stakeholders guide method selection, the significance of counter-collective narratives, the benefits of participatory audio to hear community voices for democratizing and sustaining development and design implications of our work for HCI4D.

International program development is a complex process involving many stakeholders. Current international practice affords limited, if any, opportunities for direct community-led input into the program commissioning process, resulting in programs that may not meet the specific needs of communities on the ground. Community voice is one source of data that could help focus the design of effective development programs and interventions. However, development programs are primarily formulated based on representative and often quantitative data conducted by experts from outside the community. Through a participatory video production process with disadvantaged women farmers in rural Bangladesh, we explore the opportunities for including meaningful community voices in these institutionalized processes. We present practical design implications for how community-generated voices can act as rich data, establishing confidence, community bonds and senses of accountability to inform early stages of project development, and to specifically augment and contextualize other data sources.

Community voice is widely used in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI) work with underserved communities. However, the term is unresolved, denoting disparate activities, methods, and phenomena that are at their most useful when combined. We argue for a rethink by setting out a more nuanced understanding of "community" and "voice". Building on our own experiences of HCI for development (HCI4D) work and the existing literature, we propose a framework for the benefits it can bring to those who actively engage with communities as part of their work. This framework can be understood in terms of its four constituent benefits for CSCW and HCI4D practitioners: (i) understanding context, (ii) creating empathy, (iii) leveraging local skills and knowledge, and (iv) building trust and buy-in. We reflect on how an improved understanding of these benefits applies to three prior projects with women living in Bangladesh and discuss the issues and need for more work on community voice. Finally, we discuss how this more detailed perspective on community voice helps us understand power dynamics and polyvocal communities in development contexts.

The rise of gig economy platforms has highlighted the impact platform and algorithm design can have upon workers’ experiences. This paper reports on an extended series of collaborative design engagements with a private company and an international non-government organisation during the production of an Interactive Voice Response component for a gig economy platform. We present the findings of a design ethnography undertaken during this process, and discuss how design decisions reflect how each party’s values, motivations and assumptions are embedded within the final technology. There exists a need for simple methods to assist practitioners to surface and critically engage with the disparate values, priorities and assumptions held by the system’s stakeholders. We demonstrate that this can be done during the production of real-world systems through the application of constrained design as a values lever, and discuss how constraint-based values levers can support critical reflection, even in resource-constrained commercial development contexts.

Smartphones are important for international development in the Global South. This paper explores how access to smartphone technologies promote women's agency for social change in these contexts by creating learning and livelihood opportunities and increasing connection with local market and service providers. The paper presents findings from a project which provided 200 Bangladeshi rural women farmers with smartphone technologies, training and support, and qualitatively investigated their ability to cope with geographic vulnerabilities, challenging market access, and social barriers. Reporting on a subset of these women's experiences, smartphone technologies helped these women gain better access to public agricultural extension and financial services, along with better acceptance from family and society. This, in turn, improved their dignity, confidence and sense of wellbeing. Insights will help ICT4D designers and development practitioners understand the importance of low-cost, bottom-up design inputs and social factors in future projects in similar developing country contexts.

While information and communication technology for development (ICTD) researchers have prioritized advocating for community voices in innovation design and development, we have limited insights into how community voices are incorporated by the high-level decision-makers who fund and initiate development projects and programs in the Global South. Indeed, understanding local communities’ voices (expressions of needs, challenges, and priorities) in tailoring effective development projects for sustainable development is widely considered an unmet goal. Using a qualitative survey of eight decision-makers (including grantmaking donors, central governments and INGOs) we explored a number of key factors, including national and global political climates, insider-outsider interactions, and evidence-based approaches that influence the high-level decision making process, workflows, and perceptions of community voice in project commissioning within Bangladesh’s public health nutrition development arena. Our findings reveal the tensions that arise among high-level decision-makers, and highlight the challenges associated with connecting with communities during development project design and implementation. We suggest broader implications and design opportunities for inventive project commissioning approaches to bridge the gap between communities and decision-makers. Our findings are of potential value for ICTD and HCI4D researchers interested in sustainable innovation and understanding and participating in the complex workflows of the project commissioning process in sustainable global development.

Historically, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) researchers in the Global South have advocated for a community-based approach to technology design and development. However, even with this "bottom-up" emphasis, the sustainability and scalability of the resulting innovations remain major challenges, and are poorly understood. To address this gap, we take the case of Bangladesh as a typical Global South context in which development work is carried out by a complex intertwined network of stakeholders across governments, NGOs, donors, and industries. To better understand the current development landscape and its priorities for digital technologies, we conducted interviews with 14 influential decision-makers in Bangladesh who play significant roles in the development of nutrition strategies. Our findings highlight a disconnect between the Bangladesh government's "digital mandate" and the reality of digital innovation practice within the nutrition development sector. Our paper contributes to the debate on factors that affect decision-making processes. We explore the dynamics of diverse actors and institutions who are intended to participate in, but can act as obstacles to sustained bottom-up innovations. Our findings expand understanding of institutional priorities, the dynamics of intermediaries, techno-solutionism, postcolonialism, bureaucracy, competition, and other important topics in CSCW scholarship. We suggest understanding the factors that guide the decision-making process of digital innovation practices in terms of four dimensions: internal, external, vertical, and horizontal. Consequently, we recommend CSCW and HCI researchers become mediators to connect decision-makers and communities and bring their voices in ICT innovations for global development. Finally, we offer recommendations for proactive engagement with decision-making stakeholders, enabling researchers to design community-centered sustainable digital innovations for development.