"MAKING IT WORK": NAVIGATING THE POLITICS AROUND ART SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION IN ETHIOPIA

The empirical focus of this paper is on the design, development, implementation, use and scaling up of an information system to support ART (Antiretroviral Therapy) management in Ethiopia. The overall set of these processes, technical and political, which has its end objective to ensure that systems are embedded in organizational routines and produce outputs that are beneficial to the users, is what we call as “making it work.” With our normative research goal of making this ART system work in Ethiopia, we found the politics surrounding it to be a key challenge, especially in the processes of gaining entry and scaling up the system. Through our empirical analysis, we propose three sets of strategies to making it work politically: promising the future, but addressing the current problems; exploiting the “windows of opportunities” created through political hesitancies; playing the politically charged “Free and Open Source Software” card.