Telecentres have evolved into a powerful, diverse and flexible tool for people who want to improve their lives and strengthen their communities. Of this, there is no question.

Throughout this book, we’ve seen people use telecentres to learn new skills, start small businesses and invent new ways to use technology to help their communities. We’ve also seen people using telecentres to connect with teachers, health care providers, friends and relatives who only a few short years ago felt so distant that they might as well have been on another planet. And perhaps most inspiringly, we have seen people use telecentres as a source of hope: hope of becoming a doctor, an entrepreneur, a lawyer, or any thing you could imagine.

scaling up, scaling sideways

Clearly, telecentres help people and their communities step into the knowledge economy—and do it inventively, on their own terms. However, it is not only people in poor and isolated communities who have the potential to benefit from telecentres. There is also huge opportunity for governments, for businesses, and for those interested in development and poverty reduction to use telecentres as a tool for promoting positive change.

For example, enlightened governments around the world are rightly asking: how does our work change as the Internet spreads everywhere? How do we embrace e-government in a way that benefits all people? Certainly, e-government is a chance to bring government services closer to home. It is also an opportunity to renew democracy, engaging citizens in a dialogue at all levels. But this can only work if there is e-government for all. E-government that benefits only the well-off, the well-connected and the well-educated is a step backwards, not a step forwards.

Telecentres, as local information hubs and gathering places, offer the perfect front line where this transformation of government can happen. They offer not only a channel for the delivery of government services but also a platform to provide people with the skills they need for a new type of citizenship, as well as a place to negotiate the future of government creatively and inventively. And assuming the telecentres are independently run, citizens can use them to interface with all levels of government, as well as the rest of the information society.

For different reasons, telecentres also represent an opportunity for businesses of all types: small and large, local and global, old and new. Telecentres most often go where formal businesses don’t—or won’t in big numbers. They bring the tools and skills of the knowledge economy to places that the market hasn’t. And in so doing, they create both opportunity and demand in the communities they touch.

The obvious economic results are found at the local level: people use the telecentre to invent new ways of making a living, or to improve the living they are already making. They learn to use desktop publishing to promote tourism, to trade goods online or to use the Internet to find the most lucrative markets for their crops. Or, they use the telecentre as a springboard for their own knowledge economy business: brokering information, helping people interface with government and writing software.

Larger companies could also benefit from telecentres as a way to understand what “bottom of the pyramid” markets really look like. The products and services produced by most large companies are often irrelevant to the bulk of the world’s population, especially the poor. Telecentres provide larger businesses, particularly those in high-tech, with a platform to engage in real experimentation and learning at the grassroots, finding out what “village computing” really means for their future products. Done carefully, in an ethical and culturally sensitive manner, this kind of dialogue has the potential to create knowledge economies defined jointly by both users and producers of technology.

Of course, telecentres also represent a major opportunity for people concerned with global development and poverty reduction. In part, this opportunity lies in the roles telecentres play in business creation and market development. Telecentres help reduce poverty by providing a beachhead for service and knowledge economies.

However, the development potential of telecentres is also tied closely to literacy and education. Included in a broader educational mix, telecentres offer the kind of learning and skills development environment needed to help disenfranchised communities step into the information age. They provide all the basic skills you would expect: computer use, office software, Internet and information management. But, even more importantly, they provide an environment that helps people learn how to learn in a fast-moving environment, to learn through experimentation and adaptation. And they help people understand the relationship between lifelong learning and prosperity. Spreading technology skills while encouraging creativity and problem-solving at the grassroots level is essential to the educational side of any development effort today.

What confronts us now is clearly not a lack of opportunity, or even a lack of action. The telecentre movement—not to mention the number of telecentres—continues to grow every day.

The challenges we face are ones of scale, depth and longevity—making sure that the opportunities presented by telecentres are available to any community on the planet that might want them, to any person who desires to benefit from them. We must ensure these telecentres reach deep into the communities they serve in a way that is sustainable, adaptable and relevant. Spreading and deepening the reach of telecentres is the only way that the opportunities outlined above can really be seized in a meaningful way.

Meeting these challenges is partly a matter of scaling up, creating more telecentres in more places. For this to happen, all stakeholders—communities, governments, businesses and the development sector—need to re-focus their attention on telecentres and integrate them into their vision for the future. This does not necessarily mean creating new, large-scale, top-down telecentre programs. In fact, it likely means the opposite: the development of innovative, flexible financing and social enterprise models that catalyze the mass growth of telecentres from the bottom up. Nonetheless, scaling up will require sustained attention and the proper investments to make it happen.

There is also a need to scale sideways. This is about creating networks between telecentres and across the telecentre movement. Alone, a telecentre is forced to produce and manage all aspects of its operations from scratch. As a part of a network, it can draw on products, services, infrastructure, support and training developed by others within the network. Through this kind of sharing, networks have the potential to make it easier and cheaper to run a telecentre. Just as important, perhaps, networks also have the ability to make innovation and new ideas travel far and wide within the telecentre movement.

This process of scaling up and scaling sideways is already starting to happen, thanks to the efforts we’ve seen in places like Hungary and India. But this is only the beginning. If we’re all going to embrace certain core values—empowering communities, connecting isolated communities, learning for all, unleashing new voices and enhancing economic opportunity—as fundamental values for this new millennium, it means we must all step up to the plate and work together.

seven things we still need (to scale up and scale sideways )

1. Flexible, responsive and innovative social investment mechanisms to support the establishment of new telecentres at the grassroots level.
2. Well-packaged, easy-to-replicate community services for telecentres such as telemedicine, remote learning, financial remittances and egovernment.
3. Simple, proven social enterprise models that telecentres can use to generate community impact and financial revenue.
4. Flexible, on going training and support for hundreds of thousands of grassroots technology activists around the world.
5. Low-cost, easy-to-implement telecentre technology platforms, including affordable and stable internet connections for rural areas.
6. Networks and partnerships that help good ideas travel far and wide—and help the telecentre movement reach a global scale.
7. An enduring commitment to telecentres and other grassroots technology initiatives from all sectors: governments, businesses, development agencies and communities.

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