[Telecentres] Call for papers: ICT skills and economic opportunities for marginalized groups

[Maria Garrido]

The Journal of Information Technologies and International Development (ITID) invites submissions for a special issue titled ICT goes to work: Skills and economic opportunities for marginalized groups.

Submission deadline: March 30th. Please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/itid for more information about ITID, its author guidelines, and to submit a paper for this issue. When submitting the paper please indicate in the field "comments to the editors" that it is for the ICT skills and employability special issue

Guest editors :
Chris Coward and Maria Garrido (Center for Information & Society, ICT and Development Group, University of Washington) and Akthar Badshah (Community Affairs, Microsoft Corporation)

A fundamental premise of ICT and international development is that people equipped with basic ICT skills should be more employable than those without these skills, and in turn have access to increased economic opportunities. Many nongovernmental organizations, telecenters in particular, state that improving the economic livelihood of their communities is one of their most important missions. Many training programs from donor and public-supported to privately operated, have been built with the express purpose of providing the people who come into the centers with the basic skills they need to be hired by a local company, obtain a better-paying job, or start a microenterprise.

This special issue on ICT goes to work: Skills and economic opportunities for marginalized groups invites papers that address this topic with novel, theoretically grounded, and methodologically sound research. We will also accept a limited number of practitioner submissions. Papers may address the following questions, for example:
*       To what extent does having basic ICT skills affect an individual's employment prospects (e.g., quantitative analyses of income differentials, numbers and types of jobs that are available)?
*       Have basic ICT skills positively affected microenterprise creation?
*       How does gaining ICT skills affect employability compared with gaining other types of skills (e.g., learning English, learning how to search for jobs)?
*       What are the approaches and outcomes of different training programs?
*       What government policies and other factors influence employability?

This special issue is primarily concerned with basic ICT skills (e.g., computer fundamentals, productivity applications, employment sector specific applications) and programs targeting marginalized populations, not with the advanced engineering skills needed for employment in, for instance, the IT export service sector.

The topic of this ITID special issue is inherently multidisciplinary. The editors welcome a diverse pool of submissions from fields such as economics, development communications, education, rural sociology, engineering, and public policy.

Information Technologies and International Development (ITID) is the leading journal focusing on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICT) with international development. ITID is published by the MIT Press and edited at the University of Southern California and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

If you have any questions related to this special issue, please contact:

Maria Garrido, PhD
migarrid at u.washington.edu<mailto:migarrid at u.washington.edu>
Research Associate
Center for Information and Society, ICT and Development Group
The Information School, University of Washington

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