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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Glob. Womens Health

Sec. Quality of Life

Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fgwh.2025.1490918

This article is part of the Research Topic Reviews in Serious Games and Mobile Health Interventions: Form Design, Implementation, User Engagement, and Behavior Change View all 8 articles

Smartphone-enabled Empowerment and Combatting Gender-based Violence through a Citizen Science Approach in Tanzania

Provisionally accepted
  • University College London, London, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In rural regions where gender-based violence (GBV) is rampant and communities are largely offline and off-the-map, technology-enabled interventions are emerging to enhance women’s quality of life. These initiatives offer opportunities to empirically test the efficacy of citizen science approaches to anti-GBV efforts and contribute to broader debates on the role of smartphones in women’s empowerment. Despite the rapid growth of citizen science-driven GBV projects, rigorous evaluations of their impact remain scarce. At the same time, the presumed link between information communication technology (ICT) access and empowerment - as reflected in target 5.b of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) - remains contested. We seek to fill this gap and produce insights relevant to community-based organizations (CBOs), governments, international bodies, and others tackling GBV and digital exclusion. We do this through a mixed-method approach, guided by contribution analysis (CA) as the mode of logical enquiry. We also apply a novel adaptation of Warshauer’s framework of ICT access and Cattaneo and Chapman’s model for empowerment to rigorously unpack the variables and the relationship between them. This work represents the first time these two conceptual models have been combined. It also serves as a rare example of a related empirical work offering high-resolution conceptual clarity. The findings reflect positively on citizen science methodologies, demonstrating their cost-effectiveness, role in fostering informed communities, and ability to capture locally-grounded observations that would otherwise be out of reach. The results indicate a rise in GBV response interventions due to improved case identification using the approach. However, the link between smartphone access and personal empowerment is weak. Digital competency skills development was measurable but did not surpass a basic level. Smartphones were primarily used for entertainment and socializing rather than for improving life chances. These findings challenge the assumption that digital access alone is a catalyst for empowerment. While being offline arguably begets marginalization, findings suggest the reverse is equally true. The marginalized have less chance to translate device ownership into meaningful access. Thus, we cannot rest on providing devices and training alone. Solutions must be holistic and take into account the social embeddedness of technology.

    Keywords: citizen science, gender-based violence, Digital exclusion, ICT4D (ICT for development), Female empowerment, Low and middle income countries (LAMIC)

    Received: 04 Sep 2024; Accepted: 26 Mar 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 KLEIN, Kostkova, Kasunga and Chapman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: CHANDLER KLEIN, University College London, London, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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