  The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, disproportionally affecting vulnerable
people and deepening pre-existing inequalities (Dreze, 2020; Qureshi, 2021),
have interested the very same "development" processes that the IFIP Working
Group 9.4 on the Implications of Information and Digital Technologies for
Development has dealt with over time. A global development paradigm (Oldekop et
al., 2020) has emerged in response to the global nature of the crisis, infusing
new meaning in the spirit of "making a better world" with ICTs (Walsham, 2012)
that always have characterised ICT4D research. Such a new meaning
contextualises our research in the landscape of the first pandemic of the
datafied society (Milan & Trere, 2020), coming to terms with the silencing of
narratives from the margins within the pandemic (Milan et al., 2021) - in
Qureshi's (2021) words, a "pandemics within the pandemic" producing new
socio-economic inequities in a state of global emergency.
