As AI is increasingly used in public services, concerns have grown about bias and misalignment with community values. To investigate how ordinary citizens reason about fairness in public-sector AI, we conducted a scenario-based study with 110 participants who evaluated 13 algorithmically-informed government decision systems. Drawing on their responses, we analyze how auditors evaluate risks, identify impacted groups, and navigate fairness trade-offs. Our findings reveal that participants do not audit arbitrarily; they adjust their evaluations to context, reason from values, and exhibit principled subjectivity by applying fairness orientations consistently while remaining sensitive to scenario-specific details. However, we also observe tensions between bias recognition and prioritization, suggesting a gap between awareness and actionable design focus. Building on literature in participatory AI, algorithmic impact assessments, and user-driven auditing, we argue that good auditors are not merely detectors of error but normative agents who surface latent value tensions. We conclude by offering design implications for audit tooling that supports individual and group deliberation, trade-off reasoning, and equity-centered decision-making in the oversight of public algorithms.

We present findings from a three country study exploring the intersection between female intimate health and religious beliefs. Through a qualitative study with Muslim female populations in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia, three different Muslim majority contexts, we examine the deep impact Islamic beliefs have on female intimate health and well-being. Our study investigates the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of Muslim women to their own intimate and sexual bodies through their experiences of menarche, marriage and reproduction and menopause. The intersection of religion and female sexual bodies and health is a neglected area within HCI and we highlight how inextricably specific Islamic values are linked with women’s reproductive health in Muslim communities. We further discuss the opportunities and challenges of designing technologies for religious, non-secular beliefs and values with the aim to improve intimate health practices amongst Muslim women and to broaden the scope of health design within HCI.

Crowdsourcing enables the completion of large-scale and hard-to-automate tasks, while allowing people to earn money. However, 3.6 billion people – a workforce comprising 46.4% of the world population – who could benefit most from this source of income lack the access and literacy to use computers, smartphones, and the internet. In this paper we present Karamad, a voice-based crowdsourcing platform that allows workers in low-resource regions to complete crowd work using low-end phones and receive payments as mobile airtime balance. We explore the usefulness, scalability, and sustainability of Karamad in Pakistan through a 6-month deployment. Without any advertising, training, or airtime subsidies, Karamad organically engaged 725 workers who completed 3,939 tasks (involving 43,006 components) including translations, dataset generation, and surveys on demographics, accessibility, disability, health, employment, and literacy. Collectively, the workers produced a valuable service market for potential customers and included female, unemployed, non-literate, and blind users.

Mobile-based scams are on the rise in emerging markets. However, the awareness about these scams and ways to avoid them remains limited among mobile users. We present a qualitative analysis of the dynamics of mobile-based fraud (specifically, SMS and call-based fraud) in Pakistan. We interviewed 96 participants, including different stakeholders in the mobile financial ecosystem: 71 victims of mobile-based scams, seven non-victims, 15 mobile money agents, and three officials from regulatory agencies that investigate mobile-based fraud. Leveraging the perspectives from these stakeholders and analyzing mobile-based fraud with a four-step social-engineering attack framework, we make four concrete contributions: First, we identify the nuances as well as specific tactics, methods, and resources that fraudsters use to scam mobile users. Second, we look at other actors, beyond the victim and the adversary, involved or affected by fraud and their roles at each step of the fraud process. Third, we discuss victims' understanding of mobile fraud, their behavior post-realization, and their attitudes toward reporting fraud. Finally, we discuss possible points of intervention and offer design recommendations to thwart mobile fraud, including addressing the vulnerabilities discovered in the ecosystem, utilizing existing actors to mitigate the consequences of these attacks, and realigning the design of fraud reporting mechanisms with the sociocultural practices.

Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA) is a mechanism of informal collaborative savings that is widely used across the globe. Despite its popularity and prevalence, it is not well-studied from HCI and CSCW perspectives. The global increase in mobile penetration has created opportunities to serve the unbanked using mobile-based Digital Financial Services (DFS) for greater financial inclusion but there have not been any DFS-based interventions around ROSCAs. In this paper, we report a qualitative study involving 80 individuals to understand the dynamics of ROSCAs and opportunities for their digitization in the Pakistani context. We also present a smartphone-based Digital ROSCA platform designed on top of a simulated mobile money system. The platform was designed to be inclusive towards low-literate users. We present qualitative findings of its evaluation with 15 users (3 individual ROSCA groups). We find that digitization has the potential to support and strengthen traditional ROSCAs by mitigating issues like record-keeping, delayed payments, collection, distribution, and safety of money. It also allows the creation of payment history for individuals that can be used to score their financial credibility.

Despite having smart phones penetration, low literate novice users are still facing issues while using smart phone applications. There is a dire need to design customized application for such users to engage them actively in the digital world. In this paper, we share the design, development, and testing of an application with low literate novice users. Our research revolves around designing appropriate interfaces for low literate novice users with a focus on selection and scrolling usability. Our major findings include that using real hand gestures as animations help to explain things to low literate novice users is not recommended. This paper also revalidated the use of audio prompts as a help to complete the navigation in the application. This paper investigates some of the features and its adaptation that should be included while designing an application for low literate users. These features adaptations are for the actions of selection, scrolling, and navigation