Readily Available Technologies for Building Community Resilience Lessons from India during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have played a pivotal role in assisting communities with building resilience by responding to and recovering from crises. For example, ICTs continue to assist with the recovery process during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on a set of these ICTs – Readily Available Technologies (RATs) – and show how they can be used to assist low-resource communities during crises. We develop a community-focused conceptual framework for crisis management that emphasizes the role and impact of RATs. Furthermore, we provide two examples from India to illustrate the applicability of our framework in the current pandemic context. We invite future researchers to build further on our framework and we highlight its potential contributions.