During one of our village visits, students from a local primary school snapped this photo of me with some new friends while playing with my camera.
Overview
During the summer of 2017, while working at the Information and Computing Technology for Development (ICTD) Lab at the University of Washington, I traveled to Tanzania for 3 weeks to study how people in rural villages used a prototype version of electronic phonebook that I developed.
After my trip to Tanzania, we deployed the application to a group of approximately 100 people in four villages for a month trial. Results from preliminary focus groups, analysis of the logs from the initial deployment, and follow-up phone surveys were published at CHI 2018.
The paper is available here.
Since then, I’ve been working to maintain the system and support further research with it, led by Professor Brian Dillon at Cornell and PhD Student Jessica Rudder at UC Davis. This work is in collaboration with Professors Richard Anderson at the University of Washington, Joshua Blumenstock and Berkeley, Jenny Aker at Tufts, and Adalbertus Kamanzi at the Institute of Rural Development and Planning, in Dodoma, Tanzania.