KATALYST/Swisscontact, a project funded by DFID, SDC and SIDA is working in Bangladesh to promote the competetiveness of Small and Medium Enterprises of Bangladesh. Rural ICT is a new area of the project and we have come out with a new Business Model, basically focusing to serve the businesses as well as rural communities.
The evolution process of GHAT (Global House of Advanced Technology) was a little lengthy and we have gone through a systematic approach to develop the model. After 2 phases of market study, the research team developed the model. We invited an expression of interest from the interested party who wants to invest and finally selected two operators based on their Business Plan and equity participation. This center is named GHAT (where people gather for transportation, mainly boat), and is offering a bundle of services. As the focus is on business, we tried to concentrate on developing location and sector (business) specific contents in the local language. At the same time some common services as required by businesses. Also citizen services are being offered through the centers. The services are available both off-line and on-line. To ensure the commercial viability of the centers, we offer training, desktop publications, internet and digital photo services. Rural people can ask for any new employment opportunity at local as well as national level or anyone can get the admission information for colleges & universities. The first center launched on 20th December 2005 and 2 others are ready to go into operation. We have planned to replicate the model all over the country and want to see the model as self-sustaining. GHAT is purely operated by private sectors with holistic approach and as a development project, KATALYST is supporting the content development, awareness building activities for the pilot phase of 18 months. Due to strategic reasons and KATALYST mandate of commercial sustainability, we are trying to keep the GHAT locations not too remotely rural, where services may not be very lucrative or affordable by the users. However, our experience shows that the rural people frequently visit these locations to market their products or for any other social reasons. Additionally we are patronizing the Info-mediator's role to reach the rural communities at deep rural areas. During the whole process, we experienced the critical challenges of content development, developing demand based and updated information, and finally the delivery mechanism, some of which are yet to be resolved. We are assuming that once the model starts working, more private-sector investors will be interested to become a Franchisee of GHAT and this soon will be replicated in other areas. In fact, we have already received a number of requests from the investors. The web version of GHAT is still under regular updates and we are expecting to see a good structure by the end of January 2006. The website is located at: <www.ghatbd.com> For any further details please contact me. Thanks, Shahid Uddin Akbar ICT Consultant KATALYST/Swisscontact - Bangladesh And Coordinator ICT for Development Program - Bangladesh (ICTDPB) - Dhaka ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
