The challenges of technology research for developing regions

The work we've done in the world's developing regions has been immensely rewarding and helped make us all strong advocates for technology. The first reward is simply the experience of these countries, their surprising happiness, and the technology insights that come from being there. The deeper reward is of course actually helping people by creating new options through technology. However, we encountered a wide range of technical, environmental, and cultural challenges that are outside the scope of typical computer science research. In this article, we share some of our experiences with the hope of increasing understanding of these issues. We also hope to help others, particularly researchers from outside these regions, to avoid our mistakes. We document real challenges, try to generalize them, and suggest steps that might at least mitigate the problems.