ICTs, Youths, and the Politics of Participation in Rural Uganda
Carol Azungi Dralega · Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks · 2009
This chapter 1 explores the participatory ethos and rhetoric around information and communication technology (ICT) access and use among rural youths in Uganda for democracy and development. The main discussions of this study derive from the perception that democracy constitutes an essential part of development and the notion that young people are simply “future potential” and receptacles for learning need to be challenged. Instead, youths should be perceived and treated as active, contemporary, and indiscriminate actors in their own right. The study’s focus on rural youth is not just because they form the majority of the youth population in Uganda (Uganda Bureau of Statistics 2007), but also because they belong to communities that are in the main both geographically and socially peripheral. They live in communities that also happen to be conservative in their attitude toward the introduction and usage of new technologies and are also impoverished, and consequently have limited access to ICT resources. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.