This week I read “Understanding womens mobile phone use in rural Kenya” by Susan Wyche, Nightingale Simiyu, and Martha E. Othieno. The article was about how the increase in mobile phone usage in Africa and the internet has led to increased interest and efforts to improve socio economic issues in Africa. I noticed that this article referred to Africa as a “developing nation” which I was kind of surprised at. The term developing nation is sort of disingenuous in my opinion. It is a subjective statement from a Western standpoint. Africa has a long history of traditions and culture that are different from ours from a Western standpoint.That does not make them underdeveloped.
The article goes on to explain that the use of mobile phones and the internet has helped marginalized communities get access to resources. It allows women to get access to healthcare, farmers to have access to crop price information, and it provides people with the opportunity to make money. This could lead to economic growth in Africa.
The research in this article examined how women in Rural Kenya use their mobile phones. I thought that it was good that the research was conducted partially by two other Kenyan researchers. Having both a Western perspective and the perspective of the people they’re researching something that I don’t see often in research. The mobile phones were all pretty old. I was personally picturing smartphones before I started reading the article. I am very used to using a smartphone, so it was surprising to me that the people interviewed had older phones like nokias and other flip or slide phones.
I also like how the women interviewed were encouraged to speak in the language that they were most comfortable with. This could really help with getting genuine answers and more accurate data. One finding of the research is that the women interviewed were interviewed multiple times. Between those times, many of the women had changed the phone that they used. The phones that the women were using were mostly second hand, from men that they knew. They were usually broken in some significant way. There were two types of phones used, what they called “originals” and “china makes”. The original phones were Nokias and other popular brands, while the china makes were couterfits that did not work as well. They valued the original phones more than the counterfeits.
I also thought that it was interesting that the women valued phones that had quick access to the flashlight. For example, some phones had a button just to turn the phone's flashlight on and off. There were other phones that had flashlights on them, but you had to go into the settings to use them. Their reasoning was that there was more ease of use with the flashlight button. I thought this was interesting because I would rather not have a flashlight button. I would rather it be the way that it is on smartphones, where you open a menu and turn it on. I used to have a phone where if I shook it a certain way, the light would come on. It seemed like a good feature, but I was in middle school when I had the phone. I was running around a lot, so the phone turned on the flashlight in my pocket. On the surface it seemed really useful, but in reality it made it harder to use.
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