This paper examines the experiences and perspectives of Kenyans who use social media platforms as part of their agricultural livelihoods. Through a mixed-methods study of 324 survey respondents and 81 interviews, we present data that demonstrates the significance and shape of “social agriculture” in the Kenyan agricultural landscape. We complement previous ICT4D/HCI4D literature that has primarily focused on purpose-built agricultural platforms through a novel focus on farmers’ appropriation of existing social media platforms to enter the agricultural sector and diversify agricultural livelihoods. Our study highlights new insights into the growing phenomenon of using social media platforms for agriculture practice, including how these platforms afford particular practices around the buying and selling of produce and information on social media platforms. We also identify challenges around trust and online abuse and describe the strategies employed by participants to counter them. Lastly, we build on our findings to highlight the affordances and constraints of using social media platforms, thus contributing to the field an initial conceptualization of social agriculture as a space of commerce. We offer eight design considerations for both technology designers and international development stakeholders to strengthen the potential for social platforms to afford social agricultural practices that enrich individual lives and livelihoods.

Platform-led upskilling is training that marketplace platforms provide to vendors and self-employed workers, outside of an employer-employee relationship. Based on expert interviews with 15 heterogenous platforms, this study identifies platform-led upskilling as a practice worthy of further programmatic and research attention from the technology and development community. Through the interviews and accompanying landscape scan, we identify three broad approaches to platform-led upskilling---face-to-face, online, and in-workflow training moments---and several content types---platform proficiencies, financial and digital literacies, vocation-specific skills, and soft skills. This kind of training is important to current debates about digitization and the future of work because some platform-led upskilling aims to teach portable, lifelong skills, bringing platforms into the broader education landscape and potentially strengthening the social contract between platforms and vendors/workers. However, the scale at which platform-led upskilling will impact individuals and markets remains undetermined and needs further research.

This paper examines the discourses around emerging Internet connectivity solutions for rural and resource-constrained populations in the developing world. It draws primarily on interviews undertaken with 26 experts within the Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICTD) field, as well as on institutional explanatory and publicity materials put forward by several industry actors. We identify a sustained disconnect between different conceptions of how technology alters or bridges space---spatial imaginaries. Institutions use narratives that assume technologies eradicate or collapse distance, and thus drive transformative socioeconomic change. By contrast, expert accounts underscore the socially embedded nature of technologically mediated relations and non-infrastructural barriers to connectivity. The paper draws attention to the ways that these spatial ideas are used to justify the development of new infrastructures to extend Internet access in the developing world. The paper identifies a need for continued attention to spatial imaginaries in ICTD, not only as a guiding frame for critical research, but also as a means to improve collaboration between research and industrial practice.

Mobile devices are increasingly powerful and flexible tools for computing and communication. When ICTD workers are given a mobile phone "for work", what else do they do? And to what extent can or should an employer shape that use? This note presents research in progress, focused on rules that development projects impose to govern use of mobile devices. This work maps these rules against actual instrumental (work-related, non-prescribed) and non-instrumental (personal) device use, and enforcement of these rules, in eight projects using a popular mobile-based job aid, CommCare. We present early insights from qualitative analysis of two such deployments in India identifying a range of often conflicting policy choices that affect device use for project mission and/or professional and personal empowerment. We explore tradeoffs for morale, work quality, mission, and device integrity. We identify user remote availability, soft intimidation, and validation as mechanisms to shift authority and credibility of information sources. The implications of our findings are increasingly important as governments and NGOs arm frontline workers with mobile devices as tools to improve service delivery.

Bandwidth caps, a limit on the amount of data users can upload and download in a month, are common globally for both home and mobile Internet access. With caps, each bit of data consumed comes at a cost against a monthly quota or a running tab. Yet, relatively little work has considered the implications of this usage-based pricing model on the user experience. In this paper, we present results from a qualitative study of households living with bandwidth caps. Our findings suggest home users grapple with three uncertainties regarding their bandwidth usage: invisible balances, mysterious processes, and multiple users. We discuss how these uncertainties impact their usage and describe the potential for better tools to help monitor and manage data caps. We conclude that as a community we need to cater for users under Internet cost constraints.

Rural communities in India are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, participation in such forums is limited to the most privileged members of society, excluding those individuals who have the largest stake in the conversation.

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

The paper offers a systematic review of 14 studies of the use of mobile telephony by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the developing world, detailing findings about changes to enterprises internal processes and external relationships, and findings about mobile use vs. traditional landline use. Results suggest that there is currently more evidence for the benefits of mobile use accruing mostly (but not exclusively) to existing MSEs rather than new MSEs, in ways that amplify existing material and informational flows rather than transform them. The review presents a more complete picture of mobile use by MSEs than was previously available to ICTD researchers, and indentifies priorities for future research, including comparisons of the impact of mobile use across subsectors of MSEs and assessments of use of advanced services such as mobile banking and mobile commerce.