Understanding the Role of Stakeholders in Fostering Sustainability of Ict4d Projects: Towards a Conceptual Framework
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Date
2020-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
One of the determinant factors concerning stakeholders engaged in the development project is the
degree of their role. Sustainability of the ICT4D project has a relationship with stakeholders'
involvement. However, in the ICT4D domain, there is a lack of insight, theoretical models, and
frameworks to understand stakeholder perspectives. Understanding the role of stakeholders in ICT4D
in an effort towards the sustainability of ICT4D projects has become an Emergent Research agenda
since the is a lack of knowledge of understanding and is not well understood.
An existing sustainable eHealth ICT4D project implementation framework is adopted and modified
to build a conceptual research framework to conduct qualitative single case study. The aim of the
analysis is to provide a better understanding of stakeholders’ role in each IS Lifecyle of ICT4D project
and to deliver the research objective. An interview and focused group discussion were applied in
collecting qualitative data in addition to the use of secondary data source. A thematic analysis is
employed to analyze the data collected aimed at simplifying an understanding of the role of
stakeholders for the success and sustainability of eHealth ICT4D projects to produce impact.
Accordingly, creating a sense of project ownership and localization of eHealth ICT infrastructure,
formulation of strategy, policy and guideline, resource mobilization, building good internal
organizational process, scaling up exiting project service and sustaining the impact at scale, building
local leadership commitment, adopting ICT4D knowledge management framework, conducting Post-
Mortem ICT4D project research, alignment of the project objective and stakeholders effort with the
country’s ICT strategic vision and synergizing their team effort towards establishing a project
sustainability controlling organization are found determining issues to improve and sustain the
ICT4D project's service impact beyond the successful implementation of the project.
The finding can be used to better understand the stakeholder’s role and align themselves to wards
sustainability of ICT4D project for developing countries with similar projects objective, taking
cultural. government and donor’s needs compatibility in to consideration. However, it is still
demanding to study further for a better understanding using in-depth exploration of role and testing
the proposed theoretical framework quantitatively with an empirical data.
Keywords: ICT4D, Sustainability, Success, Stakeholders role, Stakeholders engagement, ICT4D
Description
Keywords
ICT4D, Sustainability, Success, Stakeholders role, Stakeholders engagement