ICT for Development in Southern Africa

This edition of SACJ is a special edition that focuses on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) in Southern Africa. ICT4D research (which inherently tends towards being multi-, interor trans-disciplinary) has contributed to understanding the challenges associated with the engineering, application and adoption of technologies in developing countries and contexts, thus impacting on design, policy, and practice. For the purposes of this special issue; the term “ICT” comprises electronic technologies for information processing and communication, as well as systems, interventions, and platforms that are built on such technologies. The term “development” includes, but is not restricted to, poverty alleviation, education, agriculture, healthcare, general communication, gender equality, governance, infrastructure, environment and sustainable livelihoods. Many of the past and current discourses have dealt with questions on what should be researched. Examples of these are the ICT4D 2.0 Manifesto by Heeks [1], Chaudri’s critique of ICT4D projects [2] and Gomez and Pather’s paper on ICT evaluation [3]. The discourse on the diversity of research questions is inevitable given the diverse range of disciplines involved and the plurality of epistemological perspectives on ICTs in developing regions [4]. Against the ongoing discourse on what should be researched it is essential to also keep the discourse alive on how research should be done. The academic interdisciplinary field of ICT4D research has come under scrutiny for a lack of rigour. Weber [5] identifies challenges to building useful ICT4D models of reality in that the phenomena of interest are not always clearly defined, the theories that underpin the research are not articulated carefully, and the research methods and data-analysis methods used do not conform to norms for conducting highquality empirical research. An analysis of academic ICT4D literature demonstrates that the majority of contributions are focused on best practices (including lessons learned, or success factors); field experience (including description, evaluation or analysis of an experience or project); and policy recommendations, while theory and methods, design and testing have received less attention [6]. Therefore an improved understanding of interdisciplinary communalities and differences is needed to identify the standards applicable across disciplinary and methodological distinctions for high-quality research. Extending the disciplinary discourse, Walsham [7] argues for moving beyond multidisciplinarity as currently enacted towards closer collaboration in a transdisciplinary framework. The aim of this special issue is therefore to explore topics that would enable a more profound understanding of and directions for extending research into the use of ICTs in support of economic and social development in Southern Africa, with an explicit aim of also contributing to the methodological and theoretical discourses amongst researchers in this area. The call for papers for the special issue therefore explicitly indicated the focus as being: