Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Emerging Countries: A View from the Perspective of Citizen Participation, Rural Areas and Gender in Peru

Overcoming poverty vulnerabilities is one of the concerns of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) formulated by the United Nations (UN). In this endeavor, information, and communication technologies (ICT) are destined to play a relevant role. Although important achievements have been reported, there are still social groups in which, that due to their vulnerable situation, their members are still excluded from being able to receive the benefits that ICTs can provide.
To progress in this objective, this work is based on three case studies that propose three development vectors in an emerging economy like Peru. These three case studies have been published in indexed scientific journals, thus verifying the requirement of a doctoral thesis per compendium of the doctoral program. The three case studies have been the empirical basis to carry out a critical realism analysis that has allowed us to elaborate some insights to answer the research question. After the empirical reflection on the three case studies, the inference process typical of critical realism analysis is carried out for each of the dimensions of the TSP and each level of contribution. From this inference process, a set of propositions emerge that are formulated as the first theoretical contribution of the work.