"Drawing on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to development - which shifts the focus from economic growth to a more holistic, freedom-based idea of human development - Dorothea Kleine examines the relationship between ICTs, choice, and development. Kleine proposes a conceptual framework, the Choice Framework, that can be used to analyze the role of technologies in development processes. She applies the Choice Framework to a case study of microentrepreneurs in a rural community in Chile. Kleine combines ethnographic research at the local level with interviews with national policy makers, to contrast the high ambitions of Chile's pioneering ICT policies with the country's complex social and economic realities. She examines three key policies of Chile's groundbreaking Agenda Digital: public access, digital literacy, and an online procurement system. The policy lesson we can learn from Chile's experience, Kleine concludes, is the necessity of measuring ICT policies against a people-centered understanding of development that has individual and collective choice at its heart." (Publisher)
Contents
1 Moving ICT4D towards people, towards choice, 1
2 Applying the capabilities approach to ICT4D, 17
3 Technologies in context: introducing Algun, 55
4 State ICT policies in practice: telecentres, 85
5 Meeting people: individuals, resources and media usage, 129
6 State ICT policies in practice: e-procurement, 163
7 Conclusion, 201