Impact of Information Society Research in the Global South

The second volume in the SIRCA book series investigates the impact of information society initiatives by extending the boundaries of academic research into the realm of practice. Global in scope, it includes contributions and research projects from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The international scholarly community has taken a variety of approaches to question the impact of information society initiatives on populations in the Global South. This book addresses two aspects— Impact of research: How is the research on ICTs in the Global South playing a role in creating an information society? (e.g. policy formulation, media coverage, implementation in practice) and Research on impact: What is the evidence for the impact of ICTs on society? (i.e. the objectives of socio-economic development). This volume brings together a multiplicity of voices and approaches from social scientific research to produce an engaging volume for a variety of stakeholders including academics, researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and those in the business and civil sectors of society.

Arul Chib is the Director of SiRC and Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University. He studies mobile phones in healthcare (mHealth) and transnational migration. He has over 100 research publications and conference presentations. Dr. Chib won the 2011 Prosper.NET-Scopus Award for the use of ICTs for sustainable development, accompanied by a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has been awarded fellowships at Ludwig Maxmilians University and University of Southern California. He serves on the editorial boards of Human Communication Research, Communication Yearbook, and Mobile Media and Communication, and is Senior Editor of The Electronic journal for Information Systems in Developing Countries. Dr. Chib’s research in as many as nine countries has been profiled in the media, ranging from the United Nations Chronicle to the Singaporean press. He has lectured at numerous global events and presented the keynote speech at the Media Health Communication Conference 2012 in Munich. He is the General Conference Chair for ICTD2015, and a member of the organizing committees of the IFIP 8.6 2013 and ICTD 2012.

Julian D. May is Professor in the Institute for Social Development at the University of Western Cape. He has worked on poverty reduction policy options and systems for monitoring the impact of policy, including social security grants and land reform in Southern and East Africa and in the Indian Ocean Islands. He is a Research Associate at the Brooks World Poverty Institute, the Comparative Research Program on Poverty, the Department of Social Policy at Oxford University and the South African Labour and Development Research Unit, University of Cape Town. In August 2009, he was awarded a South African Research Chair in Applied Poverty Reduction Assessment by the National Research Foundation. He has edited 3 books, published over 60 papers in books and academic journals, and produced more than 120 working papers, research reports and other publications.

Roxana Barrantes (Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is General Director and Senior Researcher at Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Professor at the Department of Economics of Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP). She is a member of the Steering Committee of DIRSI, member of the Advisory Committee for LACEEP (Latin America and Caribbean Environmental Economics Program), and Advisory Committee member of the Master’s Program in Business Law at PUCP. A former member of the Peruvian Telecommunications Regulator Board of Directors, Dr. Barrantes has served as Advisor and Consultant to other Regulatory Agencies in Peru, the Ombudsman Office, and IADB.