[UgaBYTES] Call for papers: ICT skills and economic opportunities for marginalized groups

[Meddie Mayanja]

Dear all,

This great opportunity to share what you know:

The Journal of Information Technologies and International Development (ITID)
invites submissions for a special issue titled ICT goes to work: Skills and
economic opportunities for marginalized groups. 
 
Submission deadline: March 30th. Please visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/itid
for more information about ITID, its author guidelines, and to submit a
paper for this issue. When submitting the paper please indicate in the field
"comments to the editors" that it is for the ICT skills and employability
special issue
 
Guest editors : 
Chris Coward and Maria Garrido (Center for Information & Society, ICT and
Development Group, University of Washington) and Akthar Badshah (Community
Affairs, Microsoft Corporation) 
 
A fundamental premise of ICT and international development is that people
equipped with basic ICT skills should be more employable than those without
these skills, and in turn have access to increased economic opportunities.
Many nongovernmental organizations, telecenters in particular, state that
improving the economic livelihood of their communities is one of their most
important missions. Many training programs from donor and public-supported
to privately operated, have been built with the express purpose of providing
the people who come into the centers with the basic skills they need to be
hired by a local company, obtain a better-paying job, or start a
microenterprise. 
 
This special issue on ICT goes to work: Skills and economic opportunities
for marginalized groups invites papers that address this topic with novel,
theoretically grounded, and methodologically sound research. We will also
accept a limited number of practitioner submissions. Papers may address the
following questions, for example: 
To what extent does having basic ICT skills affect an individual's
employment prospects (e.g., quantitative analyses of income differentials,
numbers and types of jobs that are available)? 
Have basic ICT skills positively affected microenterprise creation? 
How does gaining ICT skills affect employability compared with gaining other
types of skills (e.g., learning English, learning how to search for jobs)? 
What are the approaches and outcomes of different training programs?
What government policies and other factors influence employability? 
 
This special issue is primarily concerned with basic ICT skills (e.g.,
computer fundamentals, productivity applications, employment sector specific
applications) and programs targeting marginalized populations, not with the
advanced engineering skills needed for employment in, for instance, the IT
export service sector. 
 
The topic of this ITID special issue is inherently multidisciplinary. The
editors welcome a diverse pool of submissions from fields such as economics,
development communications, education, rural sociology, engineering, and
public policy. 
 
Information Technologies and International Development (ITID) is the leading
journal focusing on the intersection of information and communication
technologies (ICT) with international development. ITID is published by the
MIT Press and edited at the University of Southern California and the
Georgia Institute of Technology.
 
If you have any questions related to this special issue, please contact:
 
Maria Garrido, PhD
migarrid at u.washington.edu     
Research Associate
Center for Information and Society, ICT and Development Group
The Information School, University of Washington

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Meddie