Participation as if People Mattered – Negotiating Technology for the Afghan Education Sector
Melanie Stilz, René Herlitz · Refubium (Universitätsbibliothek der Freien Universität Berlin) · 2012
The importance of a participatory component has become broadly accepted in today’s international relief and development programs. Ac-cordingly, most organizations dealing with technology-use strategies in the education sector in Afghanistan, highlight concepts like ‘empower-ment’, ‘Afghan ownership ’ and ‘partnership ’ in their project descrip-tions. Local stakeholders are to a certain degree involved in decision making and implementation. However this does not necessarily in-clude the anticipated users or those later in charge on the ground. A governmental representative is often ‘local ’ enough. The essence of the participatory approach lies according to Morris (2003) in “working with citizens to determine their needs [..] rather than imposing an intervention ” and to regard people as agents rather than objects. Yet the definition of participation ranges from the idea that all stakehold-ers should take part in decision making to a more narrow concept of extracting local knowledge to design programs externally. This limited participation is in the case of ICTs often further re-inforced by technology being seen as a black box with a pre-defined optimal application that needs to be built up and taught by the tech-nology experienced West to those in need of development. The intro-duction of ICTs is often even motivated by particular ideas about how the technology should develop or support certain educational practice and organisational structures. This paper questions current participation practice in the area of ICTs and Development (ICT4D) and asks how technological solutions could to some extend be disconnected from Western dependencies to facilitate sustainable local solutions corresponding to local needs and capacities. Examples are drawn from existing case studies as well as from interviews conducted by the authors between 2007 and 2012 in Afghanistan with actors from various educational projects includ-ing laptop and tablet projects, mobile-phone projects, infrastructural projects and others at literacy centres, schools and universities. 1 1