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In sub-Saharan Africa, rural households are the focus of many development efforts and the transformation of smallholder agriculture is one entry point for this process. Understanding farming households’ technology choices remains one of the most critical aspects of agricultural research in rural areas. However, many technologies that are known to be effective and potentially highly beneficial have remained widely unused. One reason is that predicting farmers’ decisions concerning agricultural technologies using conventional economic theories is flawed. In this article, we suggest that human aspirations have a much greater influence on technology choices than hitherto believed. We further argue that a better understanding of aspirations will improve the targeting of technology development by researchers. We propose distributed ethnography to empirically test the influence of human aspirations on technology choice. From such insight, we anticipate better research priority setting as well as more effective rural development strategies in general.

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Mobile phone text messages can be used to disseminate information and advice to the public in disasters. We sought to identify factors influencing how adolescents would respond to receiving emergency text messages. Qualitative interviews were conducted with participants aged 12-18 years. Participants discussed scenarios relating to flooding and the discovery of an unexploded World War Two bomb and were shown example alerts that might be sent out in these circumstances. Intended compliance with the alerts was high. Participants noted that compliance would be more likely if: they were familiar with the system; the messages were sent by a trusted source; messages were reserved for serious incidents; multiple messages were sent; messages were kept short and formal.