Advancing gender equity in ICT4D through a lens of care: a case study of Ethiopia through a care-based evaluative approach

There is increasing momentum across the Global South to use digital technologies to drive economic development and advance the Sustainable Development Goals. Digital tools can transform economies, create jobs, and improve communication, yet their relationship with gendered caring responsibilities remains underexplored. Because women disproportionately bear the burden of care, their capacity to engage with ICTs is restricted, shaping how ICT4D influences their opportunities and freedoms. This thesis investigates how a care-based evaluative approach can promote gender equity in ICT4D by asking: ‘How can care be developed as a theoretical lens to understand and evaluate the gendered impacts of ICT4D?’

Adopting a critical feminist methodology, this thesis combines policy analysis, semi-structured interviews with informal women workers, and theoretical development of a novel evaluative approach. Ethiopia provides the exploratory case study, as it is liberalising its telecommunications sector while prioritising gender equality in ICT4D.

Findings, presented across three papers, demonstrate that: 1) digital policies rarely address the sociocultural roots of the digital gender divide, but incorporating caring principles into policy design offers an alternative pathway; 2) care is a fundamental yet overlooked dimension of ICT4D; and 3) an evaluative framework grounded in the feminist ethic of care is uniquely suited to capture ICT4D’s gendered impacts.

The thesis proposes a ‘Care Approach’ to evaluation, recognising relational and care-based effects often invisible in existing frameworks. For example, ICTs may enable informal women workers to provide and receive care across distances, while simultaneously limiting their ability to fully recognise others’ needs due to mediated communications. Be centring care and relationality, ICT4D can be evaluated more holistically, revealing both its enabling and constraining effects. This lens contributes to deeper understandings of how ICT4D shapes gender equity, moving beyond access metrics to consider lived, relational impacts.