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Introduction
The paper takes its practical motivation from the challenges of employing information and communication technologies (ICT) to further socio-economic development in developing countries. How to avoid failure has been a major theme in the ICT for development (ICT4D) literature, thus the disconnect between information systems development and its context of use, or what Heeks (2002) calls the “design-reality gap”, is often addressed. A core requirement for overcoming this gap is to consider IS design as a situated action that includes the embedding of the social context (Heeks, 2006). Calls for contextually appropriate design processes and participatory development has therefore been strong in this literature (e.g. Tongia and Subrahmanian, 2006; Lund and Sutinen, 2010; Pitula and Radhakrishnan, 2011). The majority of these works addresses aspects of context that are relevant specifically to design and implementation of ICTs. Characteristics such as (computer) literacy and limited material resources have a direct impact on the design and development activities, and many ICT4D studies address these kinds of contextual challenges. For instance, Sinnig et al. (2010) propose a digital story telling strategy for eliciting users’ requirements in order to address the problem of low literacy. Marais (2011) suggest that a main focus should be on identifying and nurturing the local human and institutional capacity that is required for sustainability of the intervention. While we wholeheartedly support these advices, in this paper we argue that it is also relevant to understand the role of context beyond a specific design situation. We study not only the aspects of context directly relevant for ICT projects, but more broadly how context shapes the existing work practices that utilize paper-based information systems and tools. We argue that accounting for how these tools have emerged and co-evolved together with the work practices will yield valuable insights that can inform design. Our study offers both immediate design implications (regarding e.g. functionality, content and layout of digital tools) and a deeper understanding of which contextual aspects interact with the work practices and tools. Such understanding can contribute to more robust and sustainable change initiatives (Igira, 2008). Our contribution to the ICT4D literature is to emphasize the role of context at a more granular level, beyond simply equating it with geographic location that comes with certain socio-economic variables.