Abstract
The use of structured evaluation approaches, especially those that rely on qualitative criteria for the appraisal of the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) contribution to development, is a fairly new occurrence, whose relevance to research and practice is to a large extent unclear. For this purpose, this paper proposes and applies a multidimensional validation framework that is based on the validation square framework initially developed for the evaluation of design methods. It is applied to validate an evaluations approach developed for appraisal of the ICT contribution to social and economic development. Based on the proposed validation framework it is established that despite some skepticism, the structured approach is generally useful for the evaluation of the ICT contribution to development because (i) its underlying theoretical basis demonstrates its likelihood to facilitate evaluations of the ICT contribution to development; (ii) in comparison to the existing approaches, using the structured evaluation approach will most probably produce results in less time and less cost; and finally (iii) it is useful in a variety of contexts.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded in part by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and Makerere University; the Swedish research council FORMAS, grant 2011-3313-20412-31, and by strategic funds from the Swedish government within ICT – The Next Generation.
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Kivunike, F.N., Ekenberg, L., Danielson, M., Tusubira, F.F. (2015). Validating a Structured ICT for Development Evaluations Approach. In: Nungu, A., Pehrson, B., Sansa-Otim, J. (eds) e-Infrastructure and e-Services for Developing Countries. AFRICOMM 2014. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 147. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16886-9_26
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