Introducing a new hobby for other people may inspire them to join with you. Reading, as one of mutual hobby, is considered as the very easy hobby to do. But, many people are not interested in this hobby. Why? Boring is the reason of why. However, this feel actually can deal with the book and time of you reading. Yeah, one that we will refer to break the boredom in reading is choosing the myth of the paperless office as the reading material.

The Myth of the Paperless Office

Contract farming is characterized by a contract between a farmer and a firm that will process and/or market the farmer's crop. It is a growing phenomenon in Africa; it has been a component of some of the most successful income generating projects for smallholder farmers; it has been a component of various schemes involving parastatal processing firms and the terms of the contracts between smallholders and parastatals have major consequences for the financial viability of the parastatals and, hence, for the macro balance picture in African economies.

	This paper reviews the role of contract farming. First, we provide background information on its nature and scope. Second, we use the New Institutional Economics to discuss ways in which contracting overcomes market failures common in African agriculture. We outline the conditions that make contracting the preferred form of market organization, as well as conditions under which it should not be encouraged. Third, we discuss Kenyan experience in light of the theories presented in the previous section. Finally, we discuss the policy implications. The paper draws on secondary sources to discuss contracting in Africa generally, and on a recent survey of contracted farmers in Kenya, where the most attention is focused.

Contract Farming in Africa: an Application of the New Institutional Economics

Digitalization to achieve sustainable development goals: Steps towards a Smart Green Planet.

We wish you a warm welcome to CHI 2001. The CHI Conference provides a forum for people to meet both formally and informally, to share and to learn. We trust that you will find here the intellectually exciting and personally rewarding experiences that bring people back to this conference year after year.

CHI '01 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

We present a qualitative study of mobile communication via WeChat in Southern China, focusing on the rapid proliferation of emoji and stickers and the lessening dependence on text. We use interview and observation data from 30 participants to investigate how rural, small town, and urban Chinese adults creatively and innovatively balance the use of emoji, stickers, and text in their mobile communication practices. We also discuss design implications of our research for the field of HCI, offering ways of leveraging the non-textual communication practices that we uncover, in scenarios where purely text-based communication may not suffice.

Goodbye Text, Hello Emoji: Mobile Communication on WeChat in China

The promise (and pitfalls) of ICT for agriculture initiatives

Paper as a medium persists as the de facto standard for information collection, storage, and transfer in many low-resource developing contexts. Of these contexts, the microfinance industry continues to be fascinating in the ongoing ICTD conversation due, in part, to its elimination of paper by digitizing money transfers using mobile banking. This success invites scholars, designers, and industry practitioners to design technology solutions to eliminate the perceived inefficiencies of paper in microfinance and other industries. In this work, we take a step back to assess the role and value of paper in order to give designers pause when considering a blanket digitization of existing processes, norms, and transactions. Specifically, we study a microfinance ecosystem in the city of Tema in Ghana and find that paper passbooks are able to deliver valuable context-specific information to its owners that derive from the specific affordances of paper itself. Our findings encourage a more nuanced view of paper's place in microfinance, and consequently, in similar low-resource settings.

The persistence of paper: a case study in microfinance from Ghana

This short paper extends the existing conceptualization of intermediated use in the developing world by demonstrating a range of informal practices that are conducted outside of a discrete (intermediary/beneficiary) user-interface interaction in a given point in time. Further, this paper also demonstrates how low-literate users may often voluntarily relinquish custody of an information resource in order to create and maintain intermediation. In this way we describe a broader conceptualization of intermediated use in the developing world that needs to take into account the entire sociotechnical workflow. This is particularly critical when explicitly designing for secondary/beneficiary users; it considers their specific requirements that often get overlooked while simultaneously revealing their vulnerabilities within the formal-informal continuum. We present findings from ethnographic work conducted in India and Ghana.

Contextualizing Intermediated Use in the Developing World: Findings from India & Ghana

In this paper, we describe an ethnographic study of a mobile money infrastructure, especially its design, organization, and implementation, and its potential consequences for financial inclusion goals. Through using the analytic lens of infrastructure studies to ground our findings, we observe is that infrastructures emerge in organized practice and use. Moreover, they are constantly evolving with no specific beginning and end; any bounding is contingent on our own methodological and theoretical affiliations as well as our logistical constraints. To this end, we focus our attention on the two different infrastructures – the mobile money and the loan management infrastructures – that were operating in tandem to connect low-income auto-rickshaw drivers to mainstream bank loans. We specifically privilege the human work that goes into making and sustaining this mobile money infrastructure. In doing so, we challenge the ‘unbearable modernity’ of mobile money and its purported effects on helping the poor manage their unpredictable cash flows. Eventually, we make two main contributions. First, we demonstrate that what appeared on the surface to be solely a ‘mobile money infrastructure’ is in fact a complex and, often, visibly seamless organization of at least two interacting infrastructural systems. These come together in an intricate, layered way to enable mobile money to be used for loan repayments in this low-income setting. It becomes especially important to emphasize that an infrastructure is not always organically built or spontaneously accessed in order to challenge the dominant narratives around mobile money where an insulated infrastructure is thought to enable all digital transactions and thus achieve financial inclusion. Second, we privilege the human work of what is otherwise often considered an exclusively technological infrastructure. Bringing attention to these sidelined human workers is an important concern for CSCW with its focus on the work that enables systems to function seamlessly. Indeed, mobile money remains a favorite topic of interest for development scholars and practitioners and in the emergent conversations the focus continues to remain largely on the technological innovations. Even where the retail agent networks are discussed, their work is not completely understood. Bringing attention to these sidelined human workers is an important concern in this paper.

The Unbearable Modernity of Mobile Money

The bank-led branchless banking model in India was born out of a national financial inclusion mandate that seeks to connect unbanked populations to formal financial services. This is implemented through a transformational, hybrid infrastructure that extends outreach via low-scale banking structures. These low-scale banking structures take banking services out of the brick-and-mortar bank branches and into the hands of non-bank agents (or business correspondents) that can now drive uptake in unserved regions on the branchless banking platform. This note demonstrates the results of a study that looked at Eko, one of the prominent mobile banking business correspondents in India, in its collaboration with the largest public sector bank in the country. In particular, this note will focus on the role of their retail agent network and how certain informal, frequently unstipulated, practices on their part may help in acquiring and retaining customers on the platform. In this way, the retail agent network may indeed help in sustaining the transformational mobile banking ecosystem.

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Ishita Ghosh

Papers

The promise (and pitfalls) of ICT for agriculture initiatives

The persistence of paper: a case study in microfinance from Ghana

Contextualizing Intermediated Use in the Developing World: Findings from India & Ghana

The Unbearable Modernity of Mobile Money

The agent in a transformational m-banking ecosystem: interface or intermediary?