ICT Use, Collective Agency and Community Transformation in Rural Bangladesh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper presents a collectivist or communally-oriented interpretation of the Capability Approach (CA), within an Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) project targeted at rural communities. The paper examines how rural women in Bangladesh appropriated smartphones introduced through a digital inclusion initiative. Informed by Kleine’s Choice Framework, the study explores how agency interacts with assets and structures to shape strategic life choices. In this case, the focus is on and how these engagements show expressions of collective agency within restrictive socio-cultural environments. Findings demonstrate that while women used smartphones to access information and services, the more significant outcomes emerged through relational and collective practices. A communally-oriented perspective provides valuable insights into an ICT project's design and implementation process. It highlights the importance of recognising the community members as active participants oriented to communal, rather than solely individualistic, outcomes. This article contributes to the literature on ICT4D and Community Informatics by highlighting the need for community-centric engagement and a contextually sensitive approach in designing and implementing ICT projects in rural communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".