I am happy to announce that my new edited book ‘Digital Economies at Global Margins‘ is now out! It was a pleasure working with so many brilliant thinkers and scholars who produced the critical and cutting-edge research you’ll find in the book. A huge thanks to all of the authors who contributed. Below you can… Read More: Digital Economies at Global Margins »
The previous post in this mini-series, Who can access the internet?, looked at internet penetration in country context. In this post, we compare world regions and their access to the internet. This box plot visualization shows the distribution of per-country internet penetration, i.e. the percentage of the population of countries that has accessed the internet… Read More: World regions’ access to the internet »
New forms of digital work have emerged which, in theory, can be done from anywhere. Does this mean that geography no longer matters to digital work? Not exactly. My new chapter with Amir Anwar draws on our empirical research into digital labor to outline how geography still matters, and who it matters for in a… Read More: ‘Digital Labour’ – our new publication »
The ‘techie’ archetype is the mascot of our age. Generally imagined and depicted as a youth, most often male, wearing a casual sweat-shirt, and carrying a backpack that contains the tool of his trade—the laptop. The techie dreams of building a software ‘app’ that commands a global following and so ingenious that wealthy investors line… Read More: Michel Wahome joins Geonet and talks digital entrepreneurship »
This map shows internet penetration, i.e. the percentage of the population of countries that has accessed the internet within a 12 month period, from any device (click for full size). It is an update of our earlier visualizations on this topic. Digital connectivity is often viewed as a vital resource for successful participation in the… Read More: Who can access the internet? »
Our ICT and Development seminar series gathers leading scholars and practitioners to reflect on the influence of new communication technologies on development processes. We were lucky to have four great speakers this year. If you didn’t manage to make it to any of the talks, you can find recordings of them all below.
This report is based on a three-year investigation conducted by researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at the University of Oxford and the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) at the University of Pretoria. Online gig work is becoming increasingly important to workers living in low- and middle-income countries. Our multi-year and multi-method research… Read More: New report: ‘The Risks and Rewards of Online Gig Work… »
As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east… Read More: New paper: Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital… »
My colleagues Nicolas Friederici, Sanna Ojanperä, and I have recently finished a paper in which we analyse ‘Grand Visions’ of how Internet connectivity affects development in Africa. In the paper, we contrast these visions with the actually available empirical evidence to support those claims. You will be able to read our full conclusions in the paper below: Friederici, N.… Read More: The Impact of Connectivity in Africa: Grand Visions and the… »
The ways in which we envision and talk about the internet matter. This is especially the case in the context of plans and projects to use the internet for human development, and at a time when charismatic Silicon Valley champions of new technologies are popularising narratives about its impact. This is a point that Charlotte… Read More: Spatial discourses around Internet access in the developing world (new… »