This research project aims to pick up where Incommunicado left off, to look past conferences organized in the West, the debates sponsored by western organizations, and to instead look through the lens of the individual end users on the ground. This project aims to embed itself amongst the people living at the ‘bottom of the ICT pyramid’ and to look at the same discussion from their perspective. It is this ‘other’ point of view that is too often missing in the ICT4D debate, otherwise a valuable voice that helps to put technologies, projects and organizations into their proper context.
The abstract concerns research work being conducted now about how a European university's (Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands) engagement activities with local communities in Mombasa area, Kenya. The paper will concentrate on the challenges and opportunities for such an engagement and the search for a possible model that may be suitable for this type of engagement.
