Globally, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have had to adapt to rapid digital changes, a shift accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.In Kenya, this transition has involved a significant move towards digital management tools.While many had already experienced marked digitalization over the last few decades, they completed this work differently from their European and North American counterparts.This study explores how Kenyan SMBs continue to navigate these changes and considers the potential of Generative AI in this context.Applying the concept of socio-tecture-which emphasizes social networks, relational business practices, and employees as knowledge producers-we analyze how these elements influence SMB operations in Nairobi.We highlight how socio-tecture affects business performance and growth, and discuss how an Afro-centric strengths-based approach might offer unique opportunities and challenges with the influx of new technologies like Generative AI.

Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Sagnik Mukherjee, Pradhyumna Lavania, Siddhant Shivdutt Singh, Alham Fikri Aji, Jacki O’Neill, Ashutosh Modi, Monojit Choudhury. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out both the best and worst of language technology (LT). On one hand, conversational agents for information dissemination and basic diagnosis have seen widespread use, and arguably, had an important role in fighting against the pandemic. On the other hand, it has also become clear that such technologies are readily available for a handful of languages, and the vast majority of the global south is completely bereft of these benefits. What is the state of LT, especially conversational agents, for healthcare across the world’s languages? And, what would it take to ensure global readiness of LT before the next pandemic? In this paper, we try to answer these questions through survey of existing literature and resources, as well as through a rapid chatbot building exercise for 15 Asian and African languages with varying amount of resource-availability. The study confirms the pitiful state of LT even for languages with large speaker bases, such as Sinhala and Hausa, and identifies the gaps that could help us prioritize research and investment strategies in LT for healthcare.

In this work, we conduct a quantitative linguistic analysis of the language usage patterns of multilingual peer supporters in two health-focused WhatsApp groups in Kenya comprising of youth living with HIV. Even though the language of communication for the group was predominantly English, we observe frequent use of Kiswahili, Sheng and code-mixing among the three languages. We present an analysis of language choice and its accommodation, different functions of code-mixing, and relationship between sentiment and code-mixing. To explore the effectiveness of off-the-shelf Language Technologies (LT) in such situations, we attempt to build a sentiment analyzer for this dataset. Our experiments demonstrate the challenges of developing LT and therefore effective interventions for such forums and languages. We provide recommendations for language resources that should be built to address these challenges.

There is growing evidence of ride-hailing platforms’ adverse impact on drivers. Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of drivers continue to work on these platforms. Why? The key contribution of this paper is to show that workers in technology-mediated labour markets come to be increasingly dependent on the technology-provider in order to connect with the customers. As more and more customers choose to get various tasks done via intermediary platforms, for workers who perform such tasks for a living, this translates into growing dependencies on these infrastructuralized platforms for their livelihoods and thus increased vulnerabilities to the impact of platform design and policies. These ‘new dependencies’, therefore, make it critical for us not to conflate workers’ continued use of platforms with their experiencing benefits. By drawing upon a qualitative study with auto-rickshaw drivers using Ola, a ride-hailing platform similar to Uber in India, the paper shows that a consequence of ‘new dependencies’ for drivers is that they are stuck ‘between a rock and a hard place’ whereby: a) on the one hand, the platform design heightens their precarity, provides them with little benefit, and often leads to tensions with customers, b) on the other, a shift of more and more customers from street-hailing to app-based hailing over time exacerbates dependencies for drivers on these very platforms, leaving them with little choice but to continue to use them for work.

Small and Medium sized Businesses (SMBs) make up majority of employment in Africa (around 80%). Understanding the digital transformation that SMBs in Africa went through during the pandemic can play an important role in uncovering how to build solutions that better support the African business and African worker. In this paper we report on findings from a qualitative study with 40 SMBs in Kenya. The study aimed to understand the lived experience of digital transformation, the impacts of COVID-19 on their businesses, and how they responded to such impacts using technology. We found that COVID-prompted digital transformation was reactive and opportunistic, plus social and collective. Moreover, the socialness of business goes way beyond digital transformation, and influences how SMBs in Kenya start, develop and are sustained. In illustrating this, we offer a lens to understanding work and workers of SMBs in Kenya and similar contexts across the globe.

In this paper, we examine WhatsApp use by nurses in India. Globally, personal chat apps have taken the workplace by storm, and healthcare is no exception. In the hospital setting, this raises questions around how chat apps are integrated into hospital work and the consequences of using such personal tools for work. To address these questions, we conducted an ethnographic study of chat use in nurses' work in a large multi-specialty hospital. By examining how chat is embedded in the hospital, rather than focusing on individual use of personal tools, we throw new light on the adoption of personal tools at work — specifically what happens when such tools are adopted and used as though they were organisational tools. In doing so, we explicate their impact on invisible work [77] and the creep of work into personal time, as well as how hierarchy and power play out in technology use. Thus, we point to the importance of looking beyond individual adoption by knowledge workers when studying the impact of personal tools at work.

We examine how WeChat has been adopted to support nurse-patient communication in an IVF clinic in China. In this setting, the biggest challenge to delivering high-quality patient-centred care is the large number of patients. Nurses typically spend less than five minutes with each patient during clinical visits. To compensate for such minimal in-person consultation, nurse-facilitated patient groups were created on WeChat, to extend medical care and facilitate peer support. Through an ethnographic study, we examined how these groups fit into the clinic's communication ecosystem, and the challenges they raise for nurse-facilitators who receive thousands of messages daily. We propose a set of design suggestions aiming to make the work of the nurse-facilitator easier and more effective. In highlighting the opportunities and challenges of using chat to extend care beyond the clinic, we contribute to a burgeoning discussion of how chat can support patient care in the Global South.

In this paper, we examine how two chat apps fit into the communication ecosystem of six large distributed enterprises, in India and Kenya. From the perspective of management, these chat apps promised to foster greater communication and awareness between workers in the field, and between fieldworkers and the enterprises administration and management centres. Each organisation had multiple different types of chat groups, characterised by the types of content and interaction patterns they mediate, and the different organisational functions they fulfil. Examining the interplay between chat and existing local practices for coordination, collaboration and knowledge-sharing, we discuss how chat manifests in the distributed workplace and how it fits -- or otherwise -- alongside the rhythms of both local and remote work. We contribute to understandings of chat apps for workplace communication and provide insights for shaping their ongoing development.

India is experiencing a radical technology transformation as smartphone ownership and data usage has skyrocketed, with penetration even into low-income areas in urban India. This provides an opportunity to design more inclusive services on the smartphone. This paper describes the design of SalaPrayana, a financial management application for end-users with a range of literacies. Designing apps for a target audience with a range of literacies introduces tensions between visual interface design and the complexity of information conveyed. We present our designs and discuss some of these challenges. We found we could communicate familiar information, such as payment history, easily to all users, but other more complex information such as 'Loan Status' remained challenging.

Financial inclusion has been defined and understood primarily in terms of access, thereby constituting ‘inclusion’/‘exclusion’ as a binary. This paper argues such a view to be myopic that risks treating financial inclusion as an end in itself, and not as means to a larger end. ‘Access’ oriented perspectives also fail to take into account considerations of structural factors like power asymmetries and pay inadequate attention to user practices. Through the case of auto-rickshaw drivers in Bangalore, India, and their use of Ola, a peer-to-peer taxi hailing service similar to Uber, we show that access is a necessary, but not sufficient condition to achieve financial inclusion in a substantive sense. By examining in detail, the financial needs and practices of rickshaw drivers, we identify the opportunities and constraints for digital technology to better support their financial practices and enhance their wellbeing. The paper proposes adding ‘autonomy’ and ‘affordances’ as two crucial factors to be included in the discourse on financial inclusion. Finally, we outline design implications for P2P technologies to contribute towards the financial inclusion of drivers.

We describe the design of a novel mobile phone-based application for loan management in a resource-constrained setting. In this setting, a social enterprise manages auto-rickshaw loans for drivers, taking charge of collections. The design was informed by an ethnographic study which revealed how loan management for this financially vulnerable population is a daily struggle, and loan payment is a collaborative achievement between collectors and drivers. However, drivers and collectors have limited resources to-hand for loan management. To address this, we designed Prayana, an intermediated financial management app. Prayana shares the principles of many persuasive technologies, such as education, motivation, and nudges, but is designed for users with a range of print, technical, and financial literacies and embodies the core design sensibility of enhancing users' agency. Furthermore, it does not put the onus solely on drivers to better manage their money, instead it aims to enhance the collaborative work of loan management, supporting both the drivers and collectors.

Ride-hailing services have received attention as part of the growing work around the sharing economy, but the focus of these studies has largely been on drivers. In this paper, we examine how ride-hailing is transforming the transportation practices of one group of passengers - people with visual impairments in metropolitan India. Through a qualitative study consisting of interviews and observations, we examined the use and impact of these services on our target population, who otherwise contend with chaotic, unreliable, and largely inaccessible modes of transportation. We found that ride-hailing services positively affects participants' notions of independence, and we tease out how independence for our participants is not just about 'doing things alone, without help' but is also situated, social and relative. Furthermore, we show how accessibility, in the case of ride-hailing in India, is a socio-technical and collaborative achievement, involving interactions between the passenger, the driver, and the technology.

This paper reports on the changes in the monetary ecology around loan payments by auto rickshaw drivers shortly after the introduction of a mobile app in Karnataka, India. A for-profit, social enterprise facilitates loans for purchasing auto rickshaws. The mobile app was designed and implemented to provide accurate, timely loan information for drivers, to support the collaborative work of loan collection payment, and streamline the workflows of the organization. In this paper, we report on the initial experiences with the app, and argue that its introduction led to a tighter coupling of the actors involved and moved control to the back office, which especially impacted the pre- and at-transaction interactions of the monetary ecology. The paper reflects on how these changes impact adoption and use of the app and suggests a number of changes to the design which might address the observed problematics.

In this paper we present a solution built to improve loan management for auto-rickshaw drivers in Bangalore. As part of a bid to increase financial inclusion, a social enterprise (TWU) supports drivers in taking loans from mainstream banks to purchase their auto-rickshaws. Findings from an ethnographic study show that whilst providing a vital service, TWU managed its processes through an ad hoc mixture of paper and technology. Their processes enable the flexibility crucial for supporting a financially-vulnerable community, but unfortunately important information was often not to-hand, leading to sub-optimal decisions being made about loan allocation. We developed and deployed an integrated technical solution to support TWU's work. In this paper, we describe the back-office solution and how it has assisted the organization in streamlining its operations, supporting more informed decision making and providing the opportunity to scale-up their operations.

This paper contributes to the growing literature on peer-to-peer (P2P) applications through an ethnographic study of auto-rickshaw drivers in Bengaluru, India. We describe how the adoption of a P2P application, Ola, which connects passengers to rickshaws, changes drivers work practices. Ola is part of the 'peer services' phenomenon which enable new types of ad-hoc trade in labour, skills and goods. Auto-rickshaw drivers present an interesting case because prior to Ola few had used Smartphones or the Internet. Furthermore, as financially vulnerable workers in the informal sector, concerns about driver welfare become prominent. Whilst technologies may promise to improve livelihoods, they do not necessarily deliver [57]. We describe how Ola does little to change the uncertainty which characterizes an auto drivers' day. This leads us to consider how a more equitable and inclusive system might be designed.

Helping citizens to resolve grievances is an important part of many e-governance initiatives. In this paper, we examine two contemporary initiatives that use ICTs to help citizens resolve grievances in central India. One system is a state-run call center (the CM Helpline), while the other is an independent citizen journalism service (CGNet Swara). Despite similarities in their high-level goals, approach, and geographies served, the systems have key differences in their use of technology, their level of transparency, and their relationship to government. Using qualitative interviews, field immersions, and other data, we analyze how these differences impact the experiences of citizens, officials, and the intermediaries between them. We synthesize our observations into a set of recommendations for the design of future ICT-enabled grievance redressal systems.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the rise of mobile feature phones in India saw the development of both an economy of informal media exchange and a culture of active media sharing for entertainment. Mobile phone owners paid for pirated movies and music on the grey market, and they traded them with one another, even using poorly designed mechanisms such as Bluetooth file exchange.

With the wide penetration of mobile internet, social networking (SN) systems are becoming increasingly popular in the developing world. However, most SN sites are text heavy, and are therefore unusable by low-literate populations. Here we ask what would an SN application for low-literate users look like and how would it be used? We designed and deployed KrishiPustak, an audio-visual SN mobile application for low-literate farming populations in rural India. Over a four month deployment, 306 farmers registered through the phones of eight agricultural mediators making 514 posts and 180 replies. We conducted interviews with farmers and mediators and analyzed the content to understand system usage and to drive iterative design. The context of mediated use and agricultural framing had a powerful impact on system understanding (what it was for) and usage. Overall, KrishiPustak was useful and usable, but none-the-less we identify a number of design recommendations for similar SN systems.

CGNet Swara is a voice-based platform for citizen journalism, launched in rural India in 2010. Since then, CGNet Swara has logged over 575,000 phone calls, over 6,900 published stories, and 287 reports of specific problems that were solved via the system. In this paper, we characterize the ongoing impact of CGNet Swara using a mixed-methods approach that includes 70 interviews with contributors, listeners, moderators, journalists, officials, and other actors. Our analysis also draws on the content of published posts, two focus groups, and a 9-day field immersion. Our results highlight personal narratives of the transformative benefits CGNet Swara has brought to rural communities. While the resolution of grievances is the most visible impact, we also uncover a diverse portfolio of other impacts connected to contributing and listening to the platform, as well as opportunities to further enhance impact. Our work contributes to the dialogue surrounding the impact of ICTD projects, especially those that span multiple years.

Students in the developing world are frequently cited as being among the most important beneficiaries of online education initiatives such as massive open online courses (MOOCs). While some predict that online classrooms will replace physical classrooms, our experience suggests that blending online and in-person instruction is more likely to succeed in developing regions. However, very little research has actually been done on the effects of online education or blended learning in these environments. In this paper we describe a blended learning initiative that combines videos from a large online course with peer-led sessions for undergraduate technical education in India. We performed a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that indicates our intervention was associated with a small but significant improvement in performance on a summative exam. We discuss the results of the RCT and an ethnographic study of the intervention to make recommendations for future, scalable blended learning initiatives for places such as India.

While most MOOCs rely on world-famous experts to teach the masses, in many circumstances students may learn more from people who share their context such as local teachers or peers. Here, we describe an experiment to explore how the "source" of video content, the teacher, affects online learning, specifically in the context of higher education in Indian colleges. The proposed experiment will compare three content sources -- a local lecturer (teacher from an Indian engineering college), a local peer (both male and female students similar to the targeted audience), and an internationally recognized expert (a Stanford lecturer). Students will watch videos by the various source authors, after which we will measure differences in their preference, engagement, and learning. In addition, we discuss our experiences with helping students prepare video lectures and describe the support and processes we used to curate interesting and clear peer-generated content.

Crowdsourcing is a key current topic in CSCW. We build upon findings of a few qualitative studies of crowdworkers. We conducted an ethnomethodological analysis of publicly available content on Turker Nation, a general forum for Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users. Using forum data we provide novel depth and detail on how the Turker Nation members operate as economic actors, working out which Requesters and jobs are worthwhile to them. We show some of the key ways Turker Nation functions as a community and also look further into Turker-Requester relationships from the Turker perspective -- considering practical, emotional and moral aspects. Finally, following Star and Strauss [25] we analyse Turking as a form of invisible work. We do this to illustrate practical and ethical issues relating to working with Turkers and AMT, and to promote design directions to support Turkers and their relationships with Requesters.

Previous studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), the most well-known marketplace for microtasks, show that the largest population of workers on AMT is U.S. based, while the second largest is based in India. In this paper, we present insights from an ethnographic study conducted in India to introduce some of these workers or "Turkers" -- who they are, how they work and what turking means to them. We examine the work they do to maintain their reputations and their work-life balance. In doing this, we illustrate how AMT's design practically impacts on turk-work. Understanding the "lived work" of crowdwork is a valuable first step for technology design.

This paper describes an ethnographic study of an outsourced business process - the digitization of healthcare forms. The aim of the study was to understand how the work is currently organized, with an eye to uncovering the research challenges which need to be addressed if that work is to be crowdsourced. The findings are organised under four emergent themes: Workplace Ecology, Data Entry Skills and Knowledge, Achieving Targets and Collaborative Working. For each theme a description of how the work is undertaken in the outsourcer's Indian office locations is given, followed by the implications for crowdsourcing that work. This research is a first step in understanding how crowdsourcing might be applied to BPO activities. The paper examines features specific to form digitization - extreme distribution and form decomposition - and lightly touches on the crowdsourcing of BPO work more generally.

We report on an ethnographic study of payment and banking practices in India. Currently a mobile payment mechanism is being developed in India and we were interested to see how it would fit with various current payment systems for various types of users. Therefore we studied a variety of current payment situations and gained an understanding of the banking and payment practices and needs of a diverse community. Our aim was to inform the development of interface elements, applications and services that would support the needs we uncovered. We describe our findings and the design ideas they provoked.

In this paper we compare two departments of a public administration body carrying out similar work. In one department two sections, telephony and processing, are collocated whereas in the other they are not. We demonstrate the costs of distribution, in particular how the strictly enforced division of labour and limited visibility onto the workflow of the other section causes problems when dealing with normal, natural exceptions. The setting is one of seemingly routine bureaucratic work rather than high-skilled cooperative work, thus the impact of distribution might be considered rather surprising. We argue that a key requirement for any solution is to enable practitioners on the 'shop floor' the freedom to find elegant solutions to problems.

In this paper we describe how we moved from ethnographic study to design and testing of a Mixed Reality (MR) system, supporting collaborative troubleshooting of office copiers and printers. A key CSCW topic is how remotely situated people can collaborate around physical objects which are not mutually shared, without introducing new interactional problems. Our approach, grounded in an ethnographic study of a troubleshooting call centre, was to create a MR system centred on a shared 3D problem representation, rather than to use video or Augmented Reality (AR)-based systems. The key drivers for this choice were that given the devices are sensor equipped and networked, such a representation can create reciprocal viewpoints onto the current state of this particular machine without requiring additional hardware. Testing showed that troubleshooters and customers could mutually orient around the problem representation and found it a useful troubleshooting resource.

In this paper we describe the Mixed Reality system that we are developing to facilitate a real-world application, that of collaborative remote troubleshooting of broken office devices. The architecture of the system is centered on a 3D virtual representation of the device augmented with status data of the actual device coming from its internal sensors. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this approach supports the interactions required by the remote collaborative troubleshooting activity whilst taking into account technical constraints that come from a real world application. We believe it constitutes an interesting opportunity for using Mixed Reality in this domain.

This paper describes how achieving consistent colour reproduction across different devices is a complicated matter. Although there is a technological infrastructure for managing colour across devices this is very rarely used as intended. This infrastructure has been created by modelling the problem of colour management as a wholly technical one. In this paper we illustrate the importance of understanding the management of colour as a socio-technical problem, by describing the findings of a multi-sited ethnography of designers and print shops. Our analysis of the ethnography reveals that designers build up practical, tangible, visual understandings of colour and that these do not fit with the current solution, which requires users to deal with colour in an abstract manner. This paper builds on previous research in CSCW which has considered the importance of socio-technical systems, bringing the work into a previously unexplored domain. It shows how an understanding of the social can also be central when designing technical infrastructures.

This paper argues that the design of remote help-giving systems should be grounded in articulation work and the methodical ways in which help-givers and help-seekers coordinate their problem solving activities. We provide examples from ethnographic studies of both immediate and remote help-giving to explicate what we mean by articulation work and to tease out common and characteristic methods involved in help-seeking and the giving of expert advice. We then outline how emerging technologies might best be used to support articulation work in the design and development of systems for remote troubleshooting of devices with embedded computing capabilities.

This paper uses a long term ethnographic study of the design and implementation of an electronic patient records (EPR) system in a UK hospital Trust to consider issues arising in the multi-faceted process of integration when a customizable-off-the-shelf (COTS) system is configured and deployed in a complex setting. The process involves trying to artfully work out how disparate technologies integrate with existing and evolving patterns of work within developing regulatory requirements. We conclude by suggesting ways in which ethnographic interventions and user involvement may be timed and targeted to aid in achieving this process.

Synchronous text communication is becoming recognized as a valuable workplace communication medium yet some studies of group text chat indicate that its properties can lead to interactional incoherence. We consider this issue through a detailed analytic examination of text chat transcripts by showing how participants manage their interactions through considering multiple threads, turn taking and topic change. We reveal the routine practices that participants employ to create and manage coherent interaction. These practices arise from the turn taking system in operation, which facilitates straightforward repair of misunderstandings. We conclude by considering the implications of this for design and for the organisation and management of interactions of various forms.