While a million flowers bloom across the telecentre movement, a question arises: how do we ensure the movement has the most impact?
What do telecentres—and the movement—look like when it becomes cheap enough, easy enough and useful enough for every small community on the planet to set up its own telecentre? What services and infrastructure are needed to make this happen? How do we get to the tipping point?
Over the past five years, telecentre leaders from around the world have banded together to ask exactly these questions. Chatting quietly on the sidelines, speaking loudly on podiums, writing plans and declarations, the conversation is the same. The only way to do this is to do it together. The only way is to embrace the power of networks.
Slowly, networks of telecentres have started to pop up all over the world. Some are focused on information sharing and camaraderie among people who run telecentres in a particular region. Others invest in learning, training and knowledge-sharing, helping people who run telecentres build on each other’s experience and wisdom. Still others are focused on pulling together bundles of community services—telemedicine, rural banking, literacy training—that network members can easily, cheaply and (occasionally) profitably roll out on a grand scale.
If the telecentre movement is to reach its full potential, we will need networks that do all of these things—bring telecentres together, increase their capacity and provide them with easy-to-offer services. We need these networks to work together as they take on different roles and cover different regions. Otherwise, individual telecentres will end up reinventing the wheel and will waste precious resources rather than building on each other’s strengths.
“There are many small, affirming flames all over India,” explains agricultural scientist and anti-poverty activist M.S. Swaminathan. “how do we make them into a fire that will shine for everyone? This is possible through the power of partnership.”
india: a knowledge revolution
Professor swaminathan, who became famous for his work in sustainable agriculture during the green revolution, is now spearheading india’s efforts to achieve a new revolution: one that will bring local knowledge centres with computers and internet access to hundreds of thousands of rural indian villages.
India is a veritable foundry for telecentre initiatives. From its mountainous north to the tropics of the south, India has seen countless programs employing technology as a tool for empowerment and development. And they’re now joining forces to mobilize one of the most ambitious partnerships for telecentre development ever conceived: Mission 2007.
Beginning in the 1990s, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) deployed village-based telecentres, known as knowledge centres, in the fishing villages of Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu. Some of the knowledge centres taught local women to collect online weather data to keep their husbands safe as they went out to sea. Others emphasized training farmers in various technology skills so they could use the Internet to gain knowledge, improve agricultural techniques and achieve prosperity.
In other parts of the country, social enterprises like n-Logue and TARAHaat took a different approach, helping village entrepreneurs establish Internet kiosks that provide vital information services to isolated communities. Villagers would benefit from local access to these services while kiosk owners would build sustainable businesses, contributing to the local economy. Meanwhile, national and state governments have rolled out various knowledge centre initiatives, aimed at everything from delivering government services to the remote northwest to building IT skills among the citizens of Kerala.
Wherever you look in India, you’re bound to find someone creating, using or discussing technology as a tool for development. There’s an understanding here that information and communications technologies can and will make a positive difference for India, at both a local and a national level. In a country with hundreds of thousands of poor, disconnected villages, technology is seen as a natural way to bring much needed services to rural villages while simultaneously expanding economic and educational opportunities. On a grander scale, India’s growing position as a technology-savvy nation has made it an international player for information services and products. There is so much potential for technology to improve the lives of millions of Indians; the challenge is to bring these benefits to all Indians, bridging the poverty divide rather than widening it.
Recently, a consortium of technology activists, NGOs, business leaders and government officials joined together and committed to a bold vision: to create a national network of knowledge centres that would connect every Indian village. Known as Mission 2007, this partnership of more than 150 organizations seeks to connect over 600,000 villages by August 15, 2007, in conjunction with the 60th anniversary of India’s independence. NGOs such as MSSRF and OneWorld India are playing a major role in the initiative, as are private sector entities such as Nascomm, Microsoft, HP and Tata Consultancy Services. Meanwhile, the Indian government is supporting this partnership by appropriating the equivalent of $23 million in its 2005–2006 national budget.
“Nearly 700 million people in India live in the rural areas in 600,000 villages,” explained Indian president Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam during a July 2005 speech on Mission 2007. “Connectivity of village complexes providing economic opportunities to all segments of people is an urgent need to bridge the rural/urban divide, generate employment and enhance rural prosperity. We need to innovate to increase connectivity to the villages, making clusters out of them even while retaining their individualities.”
The organizers of Mission 2007 recognize that it would be impossible to create a single, top-down telecentre model and deploy it nationwide. The success of diverse initiatives such as MSSRF, n-Logue, e-Choupal, government community information centres and many others has already proven that different communities require different solutions. Mission 2007 participants have essentially agreed to accept their various differences and approaches; rather than argue one method is better than others, they plan to encourage villages to embrace the telecentre model most suited to their needs.
Individually, each of Mission 2007’s partners has made an important difference in the lives of many Indians. But given the hundreds of thousands of villages that have yet to experience the benefits of the Information Age, there’s a pressing need for all of these groups to work in concert with each other. As a national network, Mission 2007 will allow participating organizations to share resources while learning from each other’s successes and failures.
Of course, reaching 600,000 villages in two years is a challenging goal. The only way Mission 2007 will succeed is if all the parties involved are given the platform to pitch in whatever they can to achieve the common good. Going it alone simply isn’t an option. “We don’t need more pilot projects. We need a movement,” says Professor Swaminathan, quoting Dr. A. Jhunjhunwala, a senior researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) and a co-founder of n-Logue.
And the country is taking notice. Unlike many other nations, India has an interest in telecentres that reaches the highest levels of government. The media is also doing its part by treating India’s digital divide as a major policy issue; newspapers, broadcasters and magazines have been covering Mission 2007 as a national effort. By embracing it as a common cause for all Indians, they’re laying the groundwork for a national movement that stands to empower each one of India’s 600,000-plus villages.
“Mission 2007 is a network of networks,” adds Chandrashekhar, who owns a rural kiosk in Tamil Nadu. “We all have to work collectively to achieve the target. Even if we don’t achieve the numbers by 2007, it will surely show the possibility all over the country.”
It will certainly show the world as well.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
“We don’t need more pilot projects. We need a movement,” says professor Swaminathan, quoting Dr. A. Jhunjhunwala, a senior researcher at IIT Madras and a co-founder of n-Logue.
somos@telecentros: The Power of Connections
Created in 1999 by a coalition of organizations dedicated to strengthening connections between telecentres, the somos@telecentros network links together thousands of telecentres across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Embracing technology as a tool for social inclusion and sustainable development, somos@telecentros develops capacity-building tools and projects that help telecentre operators in their daily activities, including evaluation tools, telecentre management resources and educational materials. All reources are shared through the network’s website, www.tele-centros.org.
“This network is a place where we can find so much support and solidarity,” says Derlly Pantoja, coordinator of Colombia’s telecentro Autónoma de Occidente. “It’s a wonderful circle where life experiences are shared and everybody learns from it.”
For the countless number of telecentre activists who have benefited from it, somos@telecentros represents a network of professional growth and personal development.
“With somos@telecentros, indigenous communities from Guatemala have the opportunity to learn through an intense exchange of experiences with organizations from all over Latin America,” says Manuel Marcelino Garcia, coordinator of Asodigua, a telecentre in Guatemala. “Above all, we found a sense of solidarity among friends, with whom we share dreams and ideals.”
telecentre.org Sponsors: |
Web Site Managed by: |
||||
|
|
