Technological change & the changing nature of grassroots development organizations : the case of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India (SEWA)

Grassroots development organizations (GDOs) are defined by their hybrid identity as part social movement and part NGO. In the last decade, they have received renewed attention from the international development community due to their unique governance structure that, unlike their traditional NGO peers, empowered people living in poverty to organize and help themselves to achieve political and social welfare goals. With the large-scale adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in developing countries, optimism over the feasibility of an inclusive, bottom-up development model grew even higher. In practice, however, only a handful of GDOs managed to generate impact at scale, and even among those who did, it remains unclear whether ICTs had a positive effect on their performance.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Ferreira Cardoso, Cauam.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bish Sanyal.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129017

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129017