Richard Fuchs, sociologist, president of Future Works Inc, based in the Canadian rural community of Torbay, Newfoundland (www.futureworks.ca). The author was involved in establishing North America’s first rural telecentres and has assisted with telecentre startups in Africa and Indonesia.
As international development agencies increasingly come to recognize the correlation between the adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) and economic development, we need to understand that a social investment is required for the services available in a telecentre to take root and offer benefits in the developing world.
Telecentres offer a promising
route for rural communities of the developing world to break out of their isolation
Christopher Senono used to travel by bicycle
16 kilometres each way to make a telephone call. A 30-year-old businessman from Nakaseke,
Uganda, he managed his small lumber and brick retail trade by talking on the phone
with suppliers in Kampala. The trip seemed natural in a country where the “teledensity”
is roughly three phone lines per 1,000 inhabitants. Not any more! Life in this village
60 km from Kampala has changed since the opening of a multipurpose community telecentre
(MCT) in 1999.
First launched in 1985 in the farming community of Velmdalen (Sweden), telecentres
aim to introduce new information and communication technologies to isolated areas
and provide people with the skills to benefit from them. After spreading throughout
rural areas of the North, they are now cropping up in Africa, Latin America and Asia,
often with support from international development agencies. It is likely that at
least several hundred new centres are being started up each year. In countries where
individual ownership of information and communications is out of most people’s reach,
these telecentres may become the primary way of allowing vast numbers to participate
in the information economy, provided a few basic conditions are met.
The first step is often to demonstrate how the equipment and facilities available
in a telecentre can be made to work for the communities where they are located. Second,
time must be spent helping local farmers, teachers or entrepreneurs understand the
value of information and the tools that can be used to access it. Thirdly, staff
must have the training and skills to keep abreast of developments in software, hardware
and networking technology. The most efficient way to do this is to ensure that they
have a forum within which to meet, both virtually and humanly, so that links are
created among them. Finally, once the telecentre is up and running, its staff must
court the community at large and introduce its members to basic computer skills and
identify ways in which they might benefit from the facilities and services.
Identifying and training local champions who will nurture a telecentre project can
make or break the success of such a service. It is especially important to have local
stakeholders from health clinics, municipalities, elementary schools and teacher
training colleges looking over your shoulder. They are the people who are most likely
to become the core users who will diffuse the technologies widely. In Uganda, a candidate
in a local election in the Nakaseke district turned the telecentre into a local campaign
issue, going as far as to promise people who supported him a free trip to visit a
European or North American telecentre. Without necessarily going to these ends, generating
community interest in the earliest stages of planning is a long-term asset. Often,
in developing regions, communities are involved by providing rent-free facilities
to accommodate a telecentre or by building new ones.
It takes between $50,000 and $75,000 to start a standard telecentre, although the
early planning, organizing and mobilization work can significantly increase the price
tag (the budgets of several current projects run from $450,000 to $850,000). Annual
operating costs are much less and generally include two or three staff people. There
are different paths to sustainability: telecentres sometimes become an integral part
of a hospital service, a school or a municipality after three to five years. Alternatively,
they can sustain themselves by offering such profitable services as telephone, fax,
photocopying, résumé writing, training in desktop publishing and wordprocessing.
And if they don’t manage all of this, telecentres at least have the benefit of leaving
behind a new corps of locally trained and skilled people.
As international development agencies increasingly come to recognize the correlation
between the adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) and economic
development, we need to understand that a social investment is required for the services
available in a telecentre to take root and offer benefits in the developing world.
We should see telecentres as a social investment which can help build a future in
the information economy that is interactive, not extractive. At the telecentre in
Nakaseke and in many other communities in the developing world, there are increasing
numbers of people who are committed to making sure this happens.
