I think someone is walking with me: the use of mobile phone for social capital development among women in four refugee communities

The purpose of this paper is to present a mixed method study of social capital development and use, based on an intervention which provided women from refugee backgrounds with social capital development skills and tools.

In total, 111 Afghan, Burmese and Sudanese women living in Melbourne, Australia, received peer-support training and a free unlimited fixed-dial mobile phone for one year.

Interview and call log data suggest that the training sessions and mobile phones played important roles in bonding social capital development, resulting in a complex support network among participants. To a lesser extent, there was also evidence of bridging social capital creation. By providing linkages to government institutions through an interpreter service, the mobile phones gave participants easy access to linking social capital, in their heritage language.

The program supplements existing community resources with mobile phone technology to create social capital rich networks within these disadvantaged communities, and the authors describe the community characteristics that make participants amenable to such an intervention.