Oleg Petrov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote, > We have prepared for you a special coverage on community telecenters, > in particular, on the issues of sustainability and effectiveness.
I found the focus on telecenters sustainability quite useful and timely. The "telecenter movement" (at least in Africa) has now entered its second phase - from popularisation to analysis of the impact of different models. A wider discussion on the subject would therefore be useful. > Can community telecentres be sustainable? It depends on what we mean by "sustainability" and how much we (the experts promoting telecentres) really understand communities and how far the intended recipients understand the role of ICT to their development. Aligning technologies with community needs and with their cultural, political, social and technical reality/context is a time consuming effort (we are still in the process of learning from efforts and mistakes of ICT and development). But history has shown again and again that the level of demand for specific ICT services determines their sustainability. For example, private sector driven cyber cafes targeting small businesses and urban users in need of information and communications have been successful all over Africa (the level of success varies from place to place, but there is strong viability of the commercial telecentre/teleshop/cyber-cafe models). What about rural or the disenfranchised people? Observation in Africa shows that most telecentre experiments for rural/semi urban people have not been that successful. Why? Because a) most telecentre experiments were highly technology driven with good intention to bridge the digital divide - "let us build a telecentre with ten computers here and help the people to use it" approach in the middle of heavily organic information processing culture and for people whose priorities are mainly - food, shelter, education, health, better administrators, etc. (luckily information and communication are now moving up in the priority lists) b) ignoring the aspirations, resilience, social capital and creativity of intended recipients. Some initiatives failed to acknowledge the capacity of local people and that securing participation of these people is a long-term process. c) The low status accorded to content and community conversation - simple but useful tools such as books, reading rooms, space for interaction and telephones that would have stimulated use of advanced technologies were uncared for. Of course there are other reasons for the ups and downs of individual telecentres such as quality of local telecentre management, level of infrastructure and other local specifics. Nevertheless, the experiments were useful and timely and have provided insights on what works and what doesn't. > Is there a universally applicable model of sustainability? There is no universally sustainable model for communities in rural areas yet (perhaps there will be a couple for urban areas) - a mix and match approach that a) recognizes technology's enabling role b) builds a vibrant civil society movement around telecenters sustainability (e.g. cross-subsidization, multiple income generation techniques, etc.) c) upholds the centrality of information/content that meet the actual needs of communities as critical to sustainability and d) builds on full involvement and systematic participation of the communities would be useful. > What are the key success stories and lessons learned in terms of > impact and sustainability? The key lesson is that the deployment of telecentres (at least in Africa) is not as easy as was originally thought, so there is a need for more fundamental/action research and experimenting to evolve with tens of models for thousands of different communities in our region. Lishan Adam, Independent Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------ ***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/>
