Towards an empowerment framework for evaluating mobile phone use and impact in developing countries

•Proposes an empowerment framework for analyzing mobile phone for development.•Mobile phones empower young people’s information and communication capabilities.•Mobile phones do not completely free young people from socio-economic exclusion.•Offers theoretical insights beyond the dominant economic growth formulations.

This paper challenges the dominant optimism around mobile phone contribution to socio-economic development in the developing world. It argues in favor of how mobile phones could empower socio-economically marginalized young people to overcome their marginality by examining its use within the broader socio-cultural, economic and political contexts. Drawing on the information and communication capabilities of mobile phones, this paper uses an ethnographic data and a synthesized empowerment framework to analyze the relationship between mobile phone usage and empowerment of marginalized young people in Sierra Leone. In doing so, the paper focuses on the socio-culture, political and economic uses of mobile phones. The focus on these uses is based on the argument that for mobile phones to empower marginalized young people their uses should facilitate economic, political and socio-cultural issues underpinning their marginality. The study results suggest that mobile phones empower marginalized young people to communicate and access vital livelihood information to articulate their everyday activities. However, it is not strongly evident that the use of mobile phones completely emancipates them from socio-economic and political exclusion.