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As mobile computing technologies become increasingly functional and affordable, global donor and local development organizations find ways to justify and fund their use in grassroots development work. This dissertation asks two questions: (1) In resource-constrained social sector settings, what project features govern and structure use of work-issued mobile devices? And: (2) How do decision-makers adjust to maximize the benefit of newly-introduced devices while minimizing new burdens to the project and project staff? More simply, what variables under social sector projects’ control might promote successful use of information and communication technologies in development (ICTD) projects? This research represents systematic, qualitative comparison of nine extended deployments of a popular mobile health application, CommCare. Each studied project deployed devices loaded with CommCare to health workers in India as a supportive job aid and/or a data collection tool to help monitor beneficiary populations’ health status and frontline workers’ work. This dissertation examines the conditions under which these health workers were able and willing to use CommCare devices in their jobs, and whether and how they deviated from the use of those devices prescribed by their supervisors. Primary data for this study come from 62 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, extensive review of project documents, and personal observations from field study in India over six months in 2013. Employing a sociotechnical lens and a principal agent model, my data support expectations that use of CommCare devices would help align community health workers’ behavior with their supervisors’ organization and mission-related priorities. Use of the devices improved health workers’ professional competence and improved communications, data quality, and data access. These improvements facilitated project supervisors’ monitoring of health workers and beneficiaries, and funders’ monitoring of projects. Contradicting expectations, use of CommCare devices also weakened organizational oversight and control through new data challenges and increased health worker autonomy in their personal and professional lives. These dual benefits and challenges ultimately served the overall projects’ missions.

Like much of Subsaharan Africa, development has been an ever-present aspect to postcolonial life for the Halpulaar populations of the Fuuta Tooro region of southern Mauritania. With the collapse of locally historical modes of production by which the population formerly sustained itself, Fuuta communities recognize the need for change and adaptation to the different political, economic, social, and ecological circumstances in which they find themselves. Development has taken on a particular urgency as people look for effective strategies to adjust to new realities while maintaining their sense of cultural identity. Unfortunately, the initiatives, projects, and partnerships that have come to fruition through development have not been enough to bring improvements to the quality of life in the region. Fuuta communities find their capacity to develop hindered by three macro challenges: climate change, their marginalized status within the Mauritanian national community, and the region's unfavorable integration into the global economy by which the local markets act as backwaters that accumulate the detritus of global trade. Any headway that communities can make against any of these challenges tends to be swallowed up by the forces associated with the other challenges. The upshot is that Fuuta residents feel that life is getting worse instead of better, and there is a sense that their communities do not have a viable future. While they feel frustrated and abandoned by their own government and the international community, they cannot give up trying to survive and improve the quality of their lives. Fuuta communities remain ready to engage in partnerships through development, with the hope that partners be more willing to listen to the perspectives and expertise that local communities have accumulated through a half-century of development efforts. From their point of view, the institutional infrastructure of development needs to integrate itself with the grassroots to provide better support to local production, economic activity, and social services as communities struggle to overcome the challenges they face. To Fuuta communities, such an integration would embody their notion of communitarian solidarity (jokkere en¿am), which was the primary historical basis for the survival and flourishing of Halpulaar society in the difficult environment of the region. For the time being, development practices do not align with this ideal, while the international development community operates at a substantial remove from Fuuta populations. This work recommends that development organizations and scholars seriously engage the cultural dimension of local communities to better address the survival and livelihood concerns that arise from persistent underdevelopment.

This study follows several groups engaged in the rawest form of grassroots organizing that are currently operating in zòn defavorize ("defavorized" zones) of metropolitan Port-au-Prince. Experiencing first-hand the difficulties of surviving in the overcrowded capital--which recently has meant enduring the 2010 earthquake, a cholera epidemic and flawed presidential elections--like-minded Haitians have banded together to tackle neighborhood problems by promoting social programs that simultaneously entertain music-making and community service. Such organizations include a classical music school in Cité Soleil that offers students music lessons and the chance to participate in a symphonic band as an alternative to gang involvement and drug use; a professional music theater troupe that has run intensive performance training for youth in tent cities; a hip-hop collective that has assisted U.S. deportees with integrating into Haitian society; and a rap Kreyòl group that launched a long-term project to remove trash from the streets while simultaneously releasing singles highlighting Haiti's environmental degradation. Dozens of other service-oriented cultural groups are currently active and are using music of genres ranging from rara to folkloric dance and drumming to rasin, in addition to those mentioned above, for extra-musical purposes. These groups use cultural action to address on a small scale the needs of the population that elsewhere might be met by a state with solid infrastructure. Thus, in certain contexts, cultural production provides a modest means to press for change and community development and may in fact involve efforts directed toward the reduction of violence and poverty.The case studies I evaluate are drawn from twenty-one cumulative months of fieldwork. Ethnographic data was collected through varied research methodologies, including intensive participant observation, archival research, an extensive range of interviews conducted across a polarized class structure, and engaged ethnography research techniques. The arguments advanced in this dissertation move beyond existing scholarship concerning Haitian mizik angaje (politically and socially "engaged music"), first by employing theories connecting music and violence and second by reaching outside the field of ethnomusicology in contemplating contemporary models of grassroots development.