Participation as if People Mattered – Negotiating Technology for the Afghan Education Sector

摘要: The importance of a participatory component has become broadly accepted in today’s international relief and development programs. Accordingly, most organizations dealing with technology-use strategies the education sector Afghanistan, highlight concepts like ‘empowerment’, ‘Afghan ownership’ ‘partnership’ their project descriptions. Local stakeholders are to certain degree involved decision making implementation. However this does not necessarily include anticipated users or those later charge on ground. A governmental representative is often ‘local’ enough. essence approach lies according Morris (2003) “working citizens determine needs [..] rather than imposing an intervention” regard people as agents objects. Yet definition participation ranges from idea that all should take part more narrow concept extracting local knowledge design programs externally. This limited case ICTs further reinforced by technology being seen black box pre-defined optimal application be built up taught experienced West need development. introduction even motivated particular ideas about how develop support educational practice organisational structures. paper questions current area Development (ICT4D) asks technological solutions could some extend disconnected Western dependencies facilitate sustainable corresponding capacities. Examples drawn existing studies well interviews conducted authors between 2007 2012 Afghanistan actors various projects including laptop tablet projects, mobile-phone infrastructural others at literacy centres, schools universities.