By Epiphania Kimaro
Doing my PhD at the Global Development Institute gave me invaluable skills and opportunities, including the post-PhD research dissemination fund award. This award was an opportunity but also a challenge to share my research findings with participants and diverse stakeholders, which supports my broader efforts to explore the practical utility of my research. My research focused on the people and organisational aspects of ICT4D, where I worked with several digital social enterprises and technology non-profit organisations in East Africa, to understand how the organisational context may enable or hinder outcomes of ICT4D projects.
I pursued a pragmatic approach from the very beginning of my PhD, which led to my use of practice-based research methods. This included conducting a workshop with one of the participant organisations to communicate findings, but also to explore how the findings could be used to improve practice.
A couple of months after my PhD, I have furthered my research dissemination efforts, this time with a two-fold approach. First is to reach more of the organisations that participated in my research, but also other stakeholders in the ICT4D community. Second is that because the culmination of my PhD marked the beginning of formally exploring putting my research in practice, I would use research dissemination as an opportunity to introduce this intention and build collaboration. In this vein, the first question was then how: how could I disseminate my findings to optimise reach? Since the participants and potential stakeholders are based in multiple countries, I used a combination of face-to-face and virtual means to optimise the reach of my reach dissemination.
Conducting the workshop
This involved conducting an online event while physically mobilising participants in Kenya, where I am based. In addition, I promoted the event via social media including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
After the initial planning, days then became hours, and hours seconds, until it was the day of the event: Tuesday, 14th of May 2024, 10.00 am EAT. I have learnt that disseminating research to a diverse audience of practitioners by individual researchers brings its own unique challenges. For example, I constantly wondered: how much detail is enough? How could I disseminate my findings in ways that would allow a diverse set of participants to see their experiences in the findings? This was a challenge, and my lesson was that it is important to move back and forth between specific detail and abstraction, while using language that is fit for a lay audience.
Beyond these concerns about the content, I had concerns about the conduct of the session. For example, how could I maximise turn out? I researched and consulted widely to understand, for example, the optimal times for online events.
With this knowledge, preparation, and not to underestimate the debatable role of luck, the event was a success. However, the experience did not lack unique challenges. Notably, in the world of AI and busy schedules, could I allow participants to send AI companions to record the session on their behalf? This was of course a dilemma, which I resolved by offering to send the participants a summary of the findings without allowing AI recording.
In the spirit of reflective practice, I would like to digress for a brief reflection here. A few days into my PhD journey, I walked into a charity shop near the University of Manchester campus, where a tiny book caught my attention. It was called How to get a PhD: a handbook for students and their supervisors. I knew I needed to read this book. Rightly so, as someone who had come straight from practice, with no prior research in academia other than being a student, I had a lot to learn from it. The authors, Estelle Phillips and Derek. S. Pugh share a lesson that was pure liberation for me: a PhD is research training. Based on this experience, I would add that the early research-career stage involves vital and practical lessons on handling of research outputs, especially in the rise of AI.
Moving back to the session, I began by introducing the problem that necessitated my research and the subsequent research process, before moving to the findings. Overall, the participants were engaged and found the findings relevant to their context, as reflected by some of their comments below. This was indeed empowering.
| “True, I once joined a company fresh from campus where I was getting a low wage whilst I had all relevant certification but I was in it for the skills first” |
| “Sure, the organization have the role to play in building their staffs skills and carrier” |
| “Organization leadership need to also understand their staff aspiration and mission, and try to support them whenever possible” |
| “Fascinating findings Epiphania, your next challenge is to think about the institutional support required to build up these mediating organisations. The future is indeed technology and with AI already creating a digital divide support for such work is vital” |
| “How can we access your findings? or at least this presentation” |
| “Please share the findings with me too” |
Regarding my second intention, I used the dissemination event as an opportunity to do a soft launch of an organisation I have founded to put my research into practice: BEMORIZE. This is an initiative that seeks to address a two-pronged problem:
- Technology for development/digital development projects continue to fail at high rates despite huge financial investments.
- Alongside a shift in development paradigms towards people-centred development practices, there is increasing awareness that the capacity of the people and organisations implementing digital development projects is key for the success of the projects.
Drawing from the rich primary data collected from various tech-NGOs and social enterprises in East Africa, BEMORIZE seeks to work with local organisations and stakeholders to craft context-specific solutions to create supportive organisational environments for success Digital Development projects.
In addition, I attended the 18th IFIP Conference on the Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for Development in May 2024, at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business. In addition to presenting a research paper, I also leveraged the opportunity to introduce the organisation, which was received very positively by colleagues in the ICT4D research community.
To conclude, I remain ever grateful to the Global Development Institute and The University of Manchester for building the foundation of my next career phase, and especially for the research dissemination fund award.