Thanks to all the readers who have stayed with us through the Telecentre Debates. In this issue, we are going to conclude the series. In our introductory essay, we proposed that a reasonable definition of a telecentre was the following…
"Telecentres are those entities, which exist primarily to provide the general public access to computing and/or the Internet with the explicit intent to serve a developmental purpose." This definition was specifically crafted to distinguish telecentres from public phone booths, from computer classrooms, from rural data-entry centres, from computerized post offices, and from Internet cafés – all entities that share some attributes of telecentres, but are, nevertheless, not generally considered telecentres. (There are some who subscribe to alternate definitions, which are undoubtedly valid in other conversations. The key lesson here is not necessarily to insist on a particular definition universally, but to fix a definition for the duration of a particular discussion).
The proposed definition appears to have survived the test of five debates: Authors have not quarreled with the definition itself, and nothing they've claimed has challenged the definition.
Unlike this definition of telecentres, however, telecentres themselves have received some critique in the course of the debates. The strongest indictment came from Rohan Samarajiva, founding CEO of LIRNEasia, who championed mobile phones as the channel for ICT-delivered services to rural areas. His primary argument – increasingly heard in ICT4D circles – is that with the tremendous penetration of mobile phones in the world (4.5 billion accounts and counting), even many of the poorest communities have access to inexpensive real-time voice and data communications. With such ubiquity, what, he asked was the point of trying to push connected PCs into rural areas?
In our fourth edition, Chris Coward, founder of the Center for Information and Society at the University of Washington, overviewed existing research in telecentre impact. He quotes an article by Araba Sey (a research associate at the Center for Information and Society) that asserts that telecentres "are not fulfilling their potential in achieving self-sustainability, reaching disadvantaged populations or bringing about noticeable socio-economic change." Even strong proponents of telecentres, such as Ashok Jhunjhunwala of the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, and founder of n-Logue, conceded that so far, telecentres have not yet yielded the development returns that were touted in the early years of telecentre activity. He suggested that greater policy support was required for telecentres to succeed.
On the other hand, these critiques are countered by debaters who remained firm in their faith in telecentres, and who take the value of telecentres for granted. Sriram Raghavan, president of Comat Technologies, argued that telecentres are sustainable as long as they are established by for-profit companies who own and operate them. Indeed, Comat itself is an example of such a company, as it provides the front face of the widely hailed Bhoomi land records system in the state of Karnataka, India.
Others, such as Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow of the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, and Dwight Wilson, founder and Sr Vice President of OneRoof, Inc., debated the merits of for-profit and publicly supported telecentres, but agreed wholeheartedly that telecentres provided value to their communities, either as a profitable business for entrepreneurs, or as viable community hubs for rural villages.
The most passionate case for PC-based telecentres came from Sarah Nalwoga Mpagi, of UgaBYTES, a non-profit telecentre support network based in Kampala, Uganda. She raised a frequently observed fact that in learning about PCs, both operators and telecentre clients experience an increase in pride and self-confidence. The PC has an association with much that is desired by low-income communities: wealth, knowledge, education, and prestige. Excitement and enthusiasm are the result, therefore, when novices discover to their surprise that they have the capacity to operate PCs. The capacity to use PCs also provides a practical value in employment, since increasingly, office jobs require PC usage. Both of these qualities are not typically ascribed to the mobile phone – people don't seem to gain any self-esteem in being able to use a mobile phone, nor does it make them more job-ready.
In the middle of the extremes, between those who question the impact of telecentres and those who don't doubt their positive impact, are some who have begun to consider variations of telecentres as a way to support other development work. In our fifth Telecentre Debate, Bindhu Ananth, Gautam Ivatury, and Ignacio Mas discussed the potential for "branchless banking" – where without formal bank branches, clients could nevertheless avail of financial services through micro-entrepreneurs, who would enable banking transactions, assisted by an electronic device that would allow them to record transactions digitally. Both sides conceded that the jury was still out – that more experimentation is needed, but that there was potential for something along these lines to work, and to support the growth of micro-finance.
Excitement and enthusiasm are the result, therefore, when novices discover to their surprise that they have the capacity to operate PCs. The capacity to use PCs also provides a practical value in employment, since increasingly, office jobs require PC usage. Both of these qualities are not typically ascribed to the mobile phone – people don't seem to gain any self-esteem in being a ble to use a mobile phone, nor does it make them more job-ready
We hope that the readers have enjoyed these debates, and as we end the series, we suggest a few things that, we hope, will move forward the dialogue on telecentres.
The first point is to do more to measure telecentre impact, to analyze costs and benefits carefully, and to gain an understanding of opportunity costs. As Coward noted in his article, this kind of careful evaluation is still lacking, despite many, rigorous qualitative evaluations. Qualitative evaluations are good at identifying what kinds of impact are seen; the next step is to find out how much impact it has, especially in relation to other development efforts. (Note that "how much" does not necessarily need to be in monetary terms. If increased self-confidence is the impact, how does a telecentre compare with other interventions that also see a boost in self-confidence?)
Telecentre proponents, on the whole, seem to avoid quantitative evaluations or comparisons of their projects with other interventions, but if they really believe that there are effective impact, they should welcome attempts to prove it. The IDRC-Gates Foundation joint project to understand the impact of public access to the Internet is a great step in this direction. Controlled trials, such as those performed by groups like Innovations for Poverty Action provide policy-makers with information to make critical decisions. Without that, why should a donor choose to fund telecentres, over say, a youth leadership program whose costs are lower, but with similar benefits in terms of rising self-confidence and employability? It's often heard that these questions shouldn't be "either-or," but the world has limited funds for aid – the question of its optimal disbursement cannot be shirked.
A second point is to stratify our understanding of telecentres by situating results with respect to their socio-economic context. It seems unlikely that a telecentre will have the same impact in an illiterate community whose residents struggle to feed their children each day, compared to a telecentre in a neighborhood whose well-educated, middle-income residents routinely organize protests and political campaigns. It's not unusual, in international workshops, to overhear brisk arguments about telecentres, only to find that one person is talking about PCs in refugee camps in Sudan while the other has in mind a middle-class community in urban Chile.
One thought experiment to consider is the following: For a person drawn from a given community, imagine if that person were given free access to an e-mail account – how much money could that person raise for their charity of choice, using nothing other than e-mail? Note that the answer will be very different for you, the reader of this article, and an illiterate person from one of India's remote tribal communities. And, it will be different in spite of the fact that the technology is kept constant – just e-mail. This simple question immediately touches on questions of literacy, education, (non-digital) social networks, political savvy, and so forth that provide some intuitive grasp of what a telecentre might do for a community.
Finally, we end with some open-ended questions, since it helps us to step back from the daily challenges of operation, and ask the larger questions that underlie our efforts… Is the goal- sustainability of telecentres- for their own sake or genuine development? If so many telecentre case studies end with an ambivalent statement such as "we are seeing some positive benefits, but solid, sustainable impact is not yet clear," might there not be a larger lesson to learn? And, lastly, are there even more meaningful successors to telecentres that build on their strengths and minimize their weaknesses?
