Readings

This page presents the complete reading list for the course.

Many of these papers were selected for in-class presentation and discussion by the students. Videos of these discussions and associated presentation slides are available through the lecture videos page, or by following the individual links provided in the following table.

Recommended Readings

READINGS DISCUSSIONS
Session 4: planning ICT4D interventions
Donner, Jonathan, et al. "Stages of Design in Technology for Global Development." IEEE Computer 41, no. 6 (2008): 34-41. Videos and slides
Heeks, Richard. "ICT4D 2.0: The Next Phase of Applying ICT for International Development." IEEE Computer 41, no. 6 (June 2008): 26-33.
Pentland, A., R. Fletcher, and A. Hassan. "DakNet: Rethinking Connectivity in Developing Nations." IEEE Computer 37, no. 1. (January 2004): 78-83. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)
Hudelson, Patricia M. "Introduction," and "The Toolbox." Chapters 1 and 2 in Qualitative Research for Health Programmes. Geneva, Switzerland: World Health Organization, WHO/MNH/PSF/94.3, 1994. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) (Pay particular attention to Chapter 2 section on focus groups.)  
Varkevisser, Corlien M., Indra Pathmanathan, and Ann Templeton Brownlee. "Design of Research Instruments; Interview Guides and Interview Skills." Module 10B in Designing and Conducting Health Systems Research Projects 1, 2003.  
Veeraraghavan, Rajesh, Naga Yasodhar, and Kentaro Toyama. "Warana Unwired: Replacing PCs with Mobile Phones in a Rural Sugarcane Cooperative." International Conference on Information & Communication Technologies for Development, Bangalore India, 2007.  
Session 5: economic and social conditions
Banerjee, Abhijit V., and Esther Duflo. "The Economic Lives of the Poor." The Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 1 (February 23, 2007): 141-167. Video and slides
Jensen, Robert. "The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance, and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 3 (2007): 879-924. Video and slides
Karnani, Aneel G. "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: A Mirage." University of Michigan Ross School of Business Paper No. 1035. California Management Review (forthcoming). Available at SSRN.  
Session 5: technology survery / ICT penetration
Buy at Amazon Horst, Heather, and Daniel Miller, eds. Selected chapters in The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication. Oxford, NY: Berg Publishers, 2006. ISBN: 9781845204013. [Preview this book in Google Books.]  
Session 7: social and cultural considerations
Caldwell, John C. "Cultural and Social Factors Influencing Mortality Levels in Developing Countries." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 510, no. 1 (July 1, 1990): 44-59. Video and slides
Malkin, Robert A. "Design of Health Care Technologies for the Developing World." Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering 9 (July 25, 2007): 567-587. Video and slides
Wells, Stewart, and Chris Bullen. "A Near Miss: The Importance of Context in a Public Health Informatics Project in a New Zealand Case Study." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 15, no. 5, pp. 701-704.  
Session 9: ICT4D history
Cohen, Nevin. "What Works: Grameen Telecom's Village Phones." A Digital Dividend Study by the World Resources Institute, June 2001. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)  
Kumar, Richa. "eChoupals: A Study on the Financial Sustainability of Village Internet Centers in Rural Madhya Pradesh." Information Technologies and International Development 2, no. 1 (2004): 45-74. (PDF) Video and slides
Surana, Sonesh, et al. "Deploying a Rural Wireless Telemedicine System: Experiences in Sustainability." IEEE Computer 41, no. 6 (June 2008): 48-56.  
Session 12: interfaces
Medhi, Indrani, and Kentaro Toyama. "Full-Context Videos for First-Time, Non-Literate PC Users." Presented at CHI 2007, San Jose, CA: ACM, 2007. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video
Medhi, Indrani, Aman Sagar, and Kentaro Toyama. "Text-Free User Interfaces for Illiterate and Semiliterate Users." Information Technologies and International Development 4, no. 1 (2007): 37-50. (PDF) Video and slides
Parikh, Tapan, Kaushik Ghosh, and Apala Chavan. "Design Studies for a Financial Management System for Micro-credit Groups in Rural India." In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Universal Usability. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: ACM, 2003. Video and slides
Parikh, Tapan S., and Edward D. Lazowska. "Designing an Architecture for Delivering Mobile Information Services to the Rural Developing World." In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on World Wide Web. Edinburgh, Scotland: ACM, 2006. Video and slides
Plauché, Madeline, and Udhyakumar Nallasamy. "Speech Interfaces for Equitable Access to Information Technology." Information Technologies and International Development 4, no. 1 (2007): 69-86. (PDF) Video and slides
Session 14-16: health
Anantraman, V., et al. "Handheld Computers for Rural Healthcare: Experiences from Research Concept to Global Operations." Proceedings of Development by Design, 1-10. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Blaya, J. A., et al. "A Web-based Laboratory Information System to Improve Quality of Care of Tuberculosis Patients in Peru: Functional Requirements, Implementation and Usage Statistics." BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 7, no. 33 (2007). doi:10.1186/1472-6947-7-33. Formats: (full text HTML) (PDF) Video and slides
Clifford, G. D., J. A. Blaya, R. Hall-Clifford, and H. S. F. Fraser. "Medical Information Systems: A Foundation for Healthcare Technologies in Developing Countries." BioMedical Engineering OnLine 7, no. 18 (2008). doi:10.1186/1475-925X-7-18. Formats: (full text HTML) (PDF) Video and slides
Derenzi, Brian, et al. "e-IMCI: Improving Pediatric Health Care in Low-income Countries." CHI '08: Proceeding of the Twenty-sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2008, pp. 753-762. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF)  
Fraser, H. S. F., et al. "An Information System and Medical Record to Support HIV Treatment in Rural Haiti." British Medical Journal 329 (2004): 1142-1146. Formats: (full text HTML) (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Malkin, Robert A. "Technologies for Clinically Relevant Physiological Measurements in Developing Countries." Physiol Meas 28 (2007): R57-R63. doi:10.1088/0967-3334/28/8/R01. Video and slides
Sherwani, J., et al. "HealthLine: Speech-based Access to Health Information by Low-literate Users." In Proc. IEEE/ACM Int'l Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development, Bangalore, India, December 2007. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Szot, A., et al. "Diagnostic Accuracy of Chest X-rays Acquired Using a Digital Camera for Low-Cost Teleradiology." Int J Med Inform 73 no. 1 (2004): 65-73. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Session 19: education
Kam, Matthew, et al. "Localized Iterative Design for Language Learning in Underdeveloped Regions: the PACE Framework." In CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. San Jose, CA: ACM, 2007, pp. 1097-1106. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Kremer, Michael, and Edward Miguel. "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Health and Education in the Presence of Treatment Externalities." Poverty Action Lab, September, 2001. (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Leach, Jenny, et al. Selected chapters in DEEP IMPACT: An Investigation of the Use of Information and Communication Technologies for Teacher Education in the Global South. Department for International Development, 2005. Full report: (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF - 5.9 MB); executive summary: (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Session 20: mobile payments and transactions
Vodafone, Nokia, and Nokia-Siemens Networks. The Transformational Potential of M-Transactions, Policy Paper Series No. 6 (July 2007). (This resource may not render correctly in a screen reader.PDF) Video and slides
Wishart, Neville. "Micro-Payment Systems and Their Application to Mobile Networks." InfoDev, January 2006. Video and slides
Session 21: environment and other applications
Workshop on ICTs, the Environment and Climate Change. OECD and Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, National IT and Telecom Agency. Copenhagen, Denmark, 22-23 May 2008.  
Supporting technical references
Buy at Amazon Li, S., and J. Knudsen. Beginning J2ME: From Novice to Professional. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: Apress, 2005. ISBN: 9781590594797. [Preview this book at Google Books.]  
Course materials from MIT EPROM (Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles).