This week, Panoply Digital were invited to speak at the Bond Technology for Development group meeting. The Bond T4D group is a London-based group who hold regular meetings and sessions to discuss aspects around ICT4D, including developments, information on emerging trends, and sharing best and worst practices.

Ronda Zelezny-Green and Alexandra Tyers were two of three speakers at this month’s event, speaking about our experiences with gender, mobile learning, international development and research.

Ronda’s talk focused on building an ethical framework for digital research with girls. Use of digital technology, particularly mobile phones, is growing as a medium for data collection in social research, but there needs to be consideration around implementing appropriate ethical practices. Ronda discussed privacy-related ethical considerations that emerged during her work on a mobile phone ­facilitated action research project with a community of secondary school girls in Nairobi, Kenya. She also presented her Ethical Framework: a girl­-responsive framework of ethical practice for digital research with girls – particularly those who are infrequently given a voice in international development.

Alex’s talk followed on from Ronda’s, looking at how we have gone about doing monitoring and evaluating mobile learning products for women and girls as part of our work at Panoply Digital in Bangladesh and Tanzania, focusing on gender-sensitive practices, and building on topics Ronda had already raised around ethics.

The wider group discussion picked up on these themes – in particular, discussing the ethics around collecting data and gaining consent and the ethics of both using girls as data collectors, and using their data. It was a very timely discussion, considering Whatsapp’s recent end-to-end encryption of user data, and building on previous discussions and issues around privacy and security raised by Panoply’s Michael Gallagher in a previous blog post.

You can find out more about the detailed discussions and the event on the Bond T4D website.