Dear All,
I think one of the wrong policies for the organizations to adopt tele-centers models is when they consider tele-center as a stand alone purpose, seemingly to develop tele-centers as access points only for various range of information. In many cases, I even found organizations that had already set-up tele-centers are now sweating hard to establish backward linkage with the community both in terms of its relevance, adaptability and acceptability. Reasonably many has failed, many has been silently shut down (leaving behind a mockery of promises to the poor) and some are still sustaining with funding from multiple sources. But I feel the growth pattern should be other way round. Tele-centers should rather emerge as a natural extension of other activities that grassroots organizations or local entrepreneurs are regularly doing in a particular community. For example in Bangladesh, Grameen Bank runs a country-wide network of women self help groups for micro-finance activities. These women are already in a cooperative structure and if that can be supported by community ICT processes (apart from VPP project) to facilitate their micro-finance related activities or to arrange better livelihoods, then the system is more likely to sustain. Similarly even in the remotest rural corner of Bangladesh, you'll find local marketplace (bazaars) which are often run by Bazaar committee. These bazaar committees (often are elected bodies) are the already available best examples of local rural entrepreneurs and should be the mostly likely units to be supported by community ICTs (namely Tele-center). Often I found its the lack of vision and the lack of understanding to community development that have made a wrong leader to deal the issue of tele-center so badly.
Yes, I'm hopeful as someone pointed out we're really in a learning process and the concept itself is also going through a transition. Best wishes,
Partha
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