Abstract

The use of ICTs to stimulate socio-economic development has significantly grown in popularity in the recent years and has been boosted by the “mobile revolution” of the last decade. Despite the multi-year experience of academics, donor agencies and businesses, the failure rate of ICT for Development projects is still very high, resulting in a significant waste of resources. The multiple challenges that must be faced simultaneously in these projects make them more difficult than “traditional” ICT projects and recommendations such as best practices to face them have been suggested over the years. Nonetheless, the systematic replicability of these practices has never been addressed and project management and formalized development processes that address the particular challenges of the domain are extremely rare. This thesis presents a Maturity Model derived from the experience of researchers and practitioners, collected through an extensive literature review and interviews, that aims at providing a set of guidelines to be used throughout an ICT for Development intervention to increase the probability of success.