Abstract
The increased adoption of mobile telephony for development is based on the assumption that mobile telephony has the potential to foster social change. To some, such technology can aid most developing countries to leapfrog stages of development. Yet to others, the technology is at most counterproductive: development has been understood differently by the developed in comparison to the underdeveloped. Missing in this narrative is the people’s own conceptualization of the term development as well as their gender roles, often a component of development programs. This study presents findings on an alternative conceptualization of development, dubbed maendeleo, a Swahili term that denotes process, participation, progress, growth, change, and improved standard of living—as defined by the people or women themselves as they interact with mobile telephony in rural Kenya. Using Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to analyze interviews, this study proposes an alternative conceptualization of development. This different perspective on development denotes both process and emergence, through the processes and roles that mobile telephony plays in the techno-social interactions of users, context, and other factors as they form social assemblages that are fluid in nature, hence challenging the Western proposition that new technologies produce development understood as social transformation.
Highlights
The adoption and use of mobile telephony in most developing countries has been celebrated as causing social transformation and “development”—for instance, changing the way people communicate across distances and their ability to transact business via phones
The interrelated themes that emerged from the data included mobile phones given as gendered “gifts,” mobiles phones used for microcoordination of activities, and mobile phones involved in shifting gender roles
The first theme I discovered was the suggestion that mobile phones are understood as gendered gifts
Summary
The adoption and use of mobile telephony in most developing countries has been celebrated as causing social transformation and “development”—for instance, changing the way people communicate across distances and their ability to transact business via phones. This perspective connotes a power relationship between those who “bring” and those who “receive” development: the bringers are powerful innovators of technology while the receivers are passive and helpless. A case in point is the Marakwet people of Kenya, the residents of Elgeyo-Marakwet County (EMC) which covers a total area of 3,029.9 square kilometers. Cases of female genital mutilation continue to exist, despite a ban by the government
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