Browsing by Subject "Jakarta"

This Master’s Thesis will reflect on how information can empower women in urban West Jakarta through examining two different forums that provide crucial healthcare information for women in lower income families. My main focus is on analyzing a mobile phone service, which was a pilot project by Nokia Life and Mercy Corps in West Jakarta, targeted for pregnant women and women with small children. My research is based on participatory observation, focus group discussions, and interviews in late 2011 and early 2012. Anthropological research does not provide many studies on how women in development countries use mobile phones. My Master’s Thesis tries to shed light on this area. In addition to this, the study tackles the growing but little researched field of mobile phone use in health services; the so-called Mhealth use. In my thesis I will look at technology use from a gender perspective. I am especially interested in the feelings mobile phone services such as Nokia Life generates in its women users. I will thus show how information via mobile phones can have the potential to empower women, even though some barriers to the empowerment process occur in developing countries. As a theoretical basis I will utilize, for example, Chib et al.’s (2008) ICTs for development model. I will also discuss how women in West Jakarta use their mobile phones, and argue that mobile phones can impact women’s lives, but only if the socio-cultural setting allows this. In West-Jakarta, mobile phone and Mhealth use broadened mothers’ lives within the domain of motherhood. Their cultural and social setting thus set the limits on how the mobile phones could alter their lives.