TY - JOUR
T1 - Design for empowerment : empowering Sri Lankan farmers through mobile-based information system
AU - Ginige, Tamara
AU - Richards, Deborah
AU - Ginige, Athula
AU - Hitchens, Michael
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - We developed a mobile-based information system (MBIS) to empower users to improve their livelihood activities. To do so, we first developed an empowerment framework (since one does not exist) as a basis to develop the MBIS. In particular, we conducted this research to solve an agriculture over-production problem in Sri Lanka where farmers remain trapped in a poverty cycle. They cannot make informed decisions due to lack of access to timely, context-based actionable information to achieve a good revenue. We had to generate some essential information such as current production level in real-time by capturing farmers' decisions such as what and how much to grow. For this purpose, we needed to empower farmers to actively engage them in informed decision-making process through the MBIS. In evaluating the impact of the MBIS, we found a statistically significant positive change in farmers' empowerment levels based on measuring self-efficacy, sense of control, and motivation before and after they used the application. Commercial organizations have since adopted this mobile-based system in India and Sri Lanka to solve agricultural problems, in universities Africa to mitigate hidden hunger, and the Corporative Research Center in Australia to develop digital health applications to manage chronic diseases, which indicates the approach's wide adoptability.
AB - We developed a mobile-based information system (MBIS) to empower users to improve their livelihood activities. To do so, we first developed an empowerment framework (since one does not exist) as a basis to develop the MBIS. In particular, we conducted this research to solve an agriculture over-production problem in Sri Lanka where farmers remain trapped in a poverty cycle. They cannot make informed decisions due to lack of access to timely, context-based actionable information to achieve a good revenue. We had to generate some essential information such as current production level in real-time by capturing farmers' decisions such as what and how much to grow. For this purpose, we needed to empower farmers to actively engage them in informed decision-making process through the MBIS. In evaluating the impact of the MBIS, we found a statistically significant positive change in farmers' empowerment levels based on measuring self-efficacy, sense of control, and motivation before and after they used the application. Commercial organizations have since adopted this mobile-based system in India and Sri Lanka to solve agricultural problems, in universities Africa to mitigate hidden hunger, and the Corporative Research Center in Australia to develop digital health applications to manage chronic diseases, which indicates the approach's wide adoptability.
KW - Sri Lanka
KW - employee empowerment
KW - farmers
KW - information storage and retrieval systems
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:55441
UR - https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol46/iss1/19/
U2 - 10.17705/1CAIS.04619
DO - 10.17705/1CAIS.04619
M3 - Article
SN - 1529-3181
VL - 46
SP - 444
EP - 483
JO - Communications of the Association for Information Systems
JF - Communications of the Association for Information Systems
M1 - 19
ER -
