MDG 8 ( Development Global Partnerships) and Telecentre networks : October 2005 Issue by i4d magazine

Vol. III No. 10

October 2005

The first monthly magazine on ICT4D

Connecting island communities Information for development

Telecentre movement in the Pacific

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ISSN 0972 - 804X

MDG 8 (Develop global partnerships) and Telecentre networks

Portrait telecentre.org

Partnerships for development The Mountain Forum experience

April 2004 | www.i4donline.net Kalannie Community Telecentre in Australia

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Contents

Vol. III No. 10

Features

October 2005

Mailbox

info@i4donline.net

23 News Columns

MDG 8 overview

Portrait

Development Gateway Award 2005

Develop a global partnership for

telecentre.org and interview with Mark Surman

Award for e-Choupal

development Nazrul Islam

Telecentre movement in the Pacific

Connecting the island communities Stuart Mathison

Somos@Telecentros Evolution of a regional telecentre network Karin Delgadillo, Klaus Stoll

African telecentre networks An insider perspectice Meddie Mayanja

Emerging telecentre movement in Sri Lanka Birth of a movement

Books received

42 44

Bytes for All

45 46

What’s on

The Mountain Forum experience Partnerships for development Prashant Sharma

29 32

Disaster review

In Fact Aiding partnerships

Rendezvous

The 2005 World Summit, Sept. 14-16, 2005, New York Development for development

Dr Harsha Liyanage

Disaster Feature

WSIS Prepcom 3, 19 - 30 September 2005, Geneva The final arguments

35 ICTD project newsletter

Journey of telecentres The telecentre tale Siddhartha Ghosh

The Mission 2007 Knowledge revolution in India Saswati Paik

Look out for disaster feature every month in i4d! Cover image credit: http://members.westnet.com.au

i4donline.net

News Search ICT4D news by date in the sectors of governance, health, education, agriculture and so on. E-mail Subscribe to daily, weekly, monthly newsletters online or send request to info@i4donline.net Research e-Learning projects from India. www.i4d.csdms.in/elearn.asp Learn more about FLOSS www.i4d.csdms.in/floss/introduction.asp www.csdms.org/floss-portal Print edition The past issues of the magazine are available online www.i4d.csdms.in/archive/archive.htm

The 25th issue of i4d looks nice. Wishing you much success with your continued efforts to publish a top-class magazine on information for development! Karl Harmsen Director, Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific (CSSTEAP), India karlharmsen@yahoo.com

Your 25th issue of i4d just got delivered to my office 15 minutes ago. Congratulations on the “silver” issue and the 24 issues that went before that. You have made important contributions to all of us who work in i4d by keeping us up to date with the work of our colleagues in the field. I look forward to our meeting in Tunis. Chin Saik Yoon Southbound Publications, Malaysia

Hearty congratulations for all those involved in bringing out the 25th issue of i4d. It has indeed come out well and made me feel that the real Silver Jubilee Issue (25 years) may not be far away. I must also congratulate all of you on the i4d daily news online. I only look forward to a weekly on this on print so that we can make the concerned officials of the I and B department who may not be all that Internet Savvy to read our news letter. M.P.Narayanan Chairman, CSDMS mpn88@hotmail.com

Thank you. I am sure we can spend more time for i4d in the coming year. W. Jayaweera Director, Division for Communication Development, UNESCO, France w.jayaweera@unesco.org

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Acknowledgement “We would like to acknowledge the support of Telecentre.org, IDRC in producing the MDG 8 (Develop global partnerships) and Telecentre networks special issue. The issue features articles from diverse initiatives and networks happening globally. Disclaimer: The authors are responsible for the choice and presentation of the facts contained in these articles and the opinion expressed therein, which are not necessarily those of Telecentre.org and do not commit the organisation. The designations employed and the presentation of the material throughout the publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of IDRC/Telecentre.org concerning legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the frontiers or boundaries.”

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i4d Editorial Calendar 2005 Month

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

January February March

Special Theme Tsunami

MDG Intro/Poverty Reduction - MDG 1 Gender - MDG 3

April

Education - MDG 2

May

Health - MDG 4 & 5

WSIS Prepcom

June

ICT Policy

July

Human Rights

August September

Environment - MDG 7

Global Summit

Silver Issue of i4d

Media and ICT

Global Partnerships - MDG 8

Telecentre networks

November

Youth and ICT

WSIS Tunis

December

HIV/AIDS - MDG 6

October

i4d | October 2005

Editorial Information for development

Develop global partnerships for development

www.i4d.csdms.in

ADVISORY BOARD M P Narayanan, Chairman, i4d Amitabha Pande Indian Administrative Service Chin Saik Yoon Southbound Publications, Malaysia Ichiro Tambo OECD, France Karl Harmsen Centre for Space Science and Technology Education in Asia and the Pacific, India Kenneth Keniston Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Mohammed Yunus Grameen Bank, Bangladesh Nagy Hanna e-Leadership Academy, University of Maryland, USA Richard Fuchs IDRC, Canada S Ramani Research Director, H.P.Labs, India Walter Fust Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Switzerland Wijayananda Jayaweera UNESCO, France

The Millennium Development Goal 8 focuses on developing global partnerships. The key target is to develop an open, non-discriminatory trading and financial system, which deals comprehensively with the debt of developing nations. Community action and voluntary action are two key ways in which we can accelerate the process of development and to effectively, innovatively and creatively use the diminishing development funds. Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) can also play a key role in enabling this. telecentre.org, Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), i4d, SDC, UNDPâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ICTD Programme and others have come forward to work on an issue that attempts to document telecentre networks. When efforts are concerted and energies are pooled, there are synergies created, collaborations nurtures and collective action results in a more efficient and valuable service to the community at large. This is a stated goal of poverty reduction, development and bridging the divide that exists as we enter a new phase of a global information society.

EDITORIAL BOARD Akhtar Badshah, Frederick Noronha EDITORIAL TEAM Editor Ravi Gupta Editorial Consultant Jayalakshmi Chittoor Sr Programme Officers Rumi Mallick, Saswati Paik Sr. Research Associate Sejuti Sarkar De Research Associate Manjushree Reddy Designers Bishwajeet Kumar Singh, Deepak Kumar Web Programmer Zia Salahuddin Group Directors Maneesh Prasad, Sanjay Kumar i4d G-4 Sector 39, NOIDA, UP, 201 301, India Phone +91 120 250 2180-87 Fax +91 120 250 0060 Email info@i4donline.net Web www.i4d.csdms.in Printed at Yashi Media Works Pvt. Ltd. New Delhi, India i4d is a monthly publication. It is intended for those interested and involved in the use of Information and CommnicationTechnologies for development of underserved communities. It is hoped that it will serve to foster a growing network by keeping the community up to date on many activities in this wide and exciting field. i4d does not necessarily subscribe to the views expressed in this publication. All views expressed in this magazine are those of the contributors. i4d is not responsible or accountable for any loss incurred directly or indirectly as a result of the information provided.

cc Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, 2005

i4d is supported by:

November 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

Multi stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) between governments, the private sector, NGOs and multilateral institutions have become increasingly prominent internationally as a means to address the more intractable challenges of sustainable development and poverty reduction. At the same time, the potential of new Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) as a catalyst to poverty reduction efforts is also receiving increasing attention, particularly in the context of the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS). How can institutions and pilot initiatives move from the scale of experimentation to scale up for impact on societies? This is possible by building new alliances and forming support networks. However, there are few documented examples of truly effective partnership practice that focus on the use of ICTs for Development (ICT4D) and poverty reduction. We are very pleased to be able to focus this issue on Telecentre Networks from different regions of the world and to highlight some of the key partnerships like the Mission 2007 whose zeal and impact can already be felt by the allianceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s growing membership not only in numbers but also in the diversity of the stakeholders. Like Mission 2007, there are other emerging networks in Africa and South Asia (Sri Lanka in particular), as well as interesting experiences from Latin America that we share with the readers of i4d. We look forward to completing the series on MDGs with our final issue of the year focusing on HIV/AIDS and other diseases in December, and to actively participate in Tunisia in the second phase of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in mid-November.

Ravi Gupta Ravi.Gupta@csdms.in

MDG 8 overview

Develop a global partnership Multistakeholder partnership denotes to a collaborative process which aims to bring together all major stakeholders in a new form of communication, decision-finding and possibly decision-making on a particular issue.

Over recent years, interest in better understanding the Multistakeholder Partnership (MSP) has grown significantly. Multistakeholder Partnership being an approach to address development challenges throughout the world ‘has gained much currency in development circles, trouncing the popularity of PPP (Public-Private Partnerships)’. Enormous success of a good number of partnership initiatives across the developing world has encouraged many development practitioners including development agencies, civil society and public sector to take into account MSP approach to address development problems and challenges. Globalisation has also impacted positively to promote collaboration and partnership. MSP allows organisations from diverse sectors to take advantage of innovative synergies and attain outcomes that are not always possible for any one of them to attain acting alone. Some practices in developing countries has already demonstrated that MSP possess significant potentials to put forward an institutional mechanism to strengthen each organisation involved to maximise organisational objectives while at the same time, achieve the common goals set by the partnership to address specific development issues in many important sectors, e.g. Information and Communication Technologies for Development, telecommunications, health, tourism and so on.

Definition and basic elements

Nazrul Islam Relief International-Schools Online, Bangladesh nazrul07@gmail.com

MSP denotes to a collaborative process which aims to bring together all major stakeholders in a new form of communication, decision-finding and possibly decisionmaking on a particular issue. They are based on recognition of the importance of achieving equity and accountability in communication between stakeholders, involving equitable representation of three or more stakeholder groups and their views. They are based on democratic principles of transparency and participation, and aim to develop partnerships and strengthened networks among stakeholders.

MSP can encompass a range of actors from state to non-state entities including business, civil society. All stakeholders involved in the MSP reach to an agreement to work together to realise some common goals through sharing resources and competencies. A true and effective MSP has potential to bring together three distinct elements: • Competencies: Resources, roles, responsibilities, or behaviour that are the true strengths of the partner in contributing to the social and environmental objectives of the partnership; • Complementary: Resources, roles, responsibilities, and behaviour that add value to the resources, roles, responsibilities, or behaviour of other partners for achieving the social and environmental objectives of the partnership; • Core: Contributions by each partner that assist the contributing partner to meet its own organisational objectives, for example, competitiveness, poverty reduction, or governance. MSP activities can be involved in dialogues on policy or grow to include consensus-building, decision making and implementation of practical solutions. The exact nature of any such process will depend on the issues, its objectives, participants, and scope and time lines, among other factors.

Importance of MSP MSP is not an option but necessity given the complex nature of developmental problems and challenges of the world. Increased collaboration among development agencies, civil society, governments and businesses around the world to address development issues have enhanced creditability of MSP. Several factors have contributed to emergence of MSP as a strategy to address development issues, some of which are as follows: • Over recent years the number of development issues have significantly increased and no one sector can really i4d | October 2005

MDG 8 overview

for development address all these issues. MSP encompass more holistic approach to intervene in specific areas. It involves actions by more than one partner and hence, increases chances for success. • MSP as a development strategy has the capacity to deal with a number of issues at a time through combining resources, skills and networks of diverse entities. • MSP significantly reduces transaction cost and risk linked with alternative institutional engagement. Governmental and/or intergovernmental bodies have opportunity to avoid conflicts and can assist civil society organisations to work together in a more successful way, and to avoid copying of actions. • The partnership provides a common platform or forum where they can share resources, skills and can harmonise their tasks in a way agreed by all partners.

Key issues and challenges While MSP as a strategy has enormous potential, building partnership remains a challenge. A number of factors play vital roles in designing and building MSP. • Need assessment and identification of problem are the first step to initiate a MSP; • Partners should set up the goals, aims and vision of the partnership.; • Each partner should share information among themselves of their weakness and strength; • Resources and skills required should be identified at the beginning of the partnership; • Selecting appropriate partners are important; • Partnership should be based on democratic principles. This may generate required mutual trust and understanding among partners. The issue of sustainability should be identified at the very begining of the partnership and should be carefully dealt with in the entire planning and implementation process. Capacity building initiatives and continuous learning can October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

impact positively in sustaining partnership. Several factors contribute to ensure sustainability of any partnership which are as follows: • Trust and mutual understanding among partners are important requisite for sustainable partnership; • Respect for each other’s cultural context among the partners; • Focus on achieving mutual benefit facilitating the partners to meet their own objectives as well as common goals; • Effective coordination and strong monitoring and evaluation tools play important roles in creating ground for sustainability of the MSP; • Importance of learning in MSP should get priority in the process. It is an utmost necessary to track progress and performances of the partnership. Systematic learning of the partnership can give valuable information to identify problems during implementation as well can give impetus to sustain partnership.

Opportunity for ICT4D sector While the concept of bridging the digital divide enjoys high priority in the development agenda of many developing countries, converting good intentions into project finance for ICT4D remains a challenge. Governments are rarely able to initiate sustainable and effective financing for technology projects that focus on poverty. To overcome this constraint, the MSP is increasingly becoming a viable and influential strategy for financing ICT4D projects in developing countries.

Concluding remarks In order to achieve targets set by MDGs, public, private and civil societies need to combine their resources, strengths and skills. MSP can provide an effective strategy and institutional mechanism for all three sectors to address development problems and challenges. This will not only ensure cost effective use of scarce resources but also create a synergy across the development actors to achieve MDGs.

Village phone programme in Bangladesh: An example of Multistakeholder partnership The Village Phone Programme in Bangladesh is purely a MSP bringing new information technologies to isolated rural areas while at the same time addressing issues of poverty and women’s empowerment. The programme has emerged as a success story in attracting financial involvement and support from diverse stakeholders ranging from international business enterprises to bilateral donor agencies. All of the Village Phone operators are rural women who purchase a cell phone with a loan of about US$350 from Grameen Bank. These operators then sell mobile telephone services to their fellow villagers, both making a living and paying off their loans. The programme now has a subscriber base of about 150,000 and has spread to more than 35,000 villages in 61 out of 64 districts of the country. A number of studies show that the Village Phone programme has had a positive impact on the rural economy and helped to free rural women from poverty. The Programme is a partnership between three organisations: Grameen Bank (GB) - a microfinance institution, GrameenPhone Ltd.(GP) - a telecommunication provider and Grameen Telecom (GTC) - a not-forprofit organisation. The management and administration of the programme is taken care by GTC. The success of the Village Phone lies with its business plan and partnership structure has created a ‘Win-Win” situation that allows all partners to benefit from the partners.

T ELECENTRE M OVEMENT IN

THE

P ACIFIC

Connecting the island communities Despite vibrant telecentre movement, emerging in the Pacific, Pacific telecentre initiatives face a real problem, which is the same old problem faced by the communities in which they are located – isolation.

Stuart Mathison The Foundation for Development Cooperation Australia stuartmathison@fdc.org.au

It is widely recognised that shared access points known generically as ‘telecentres’ are, at the present time, the only practical way to deliver basic ICT services to people living on the wrong side of the digital divide. This is especially relevant to Pacific Island communities, and it is against this background that a vibrant telecentre movement is gaining momentum in the Pacific. Community-based telecentres are helping to connect island communities with each other, with their Diaspora communities and with the wider world.

Telecentres in the Pacific In the Pacific, the term ‘telecentre’ is simply taken to mean a ‘community-based facility equipped with ICT tools’. They may range from community radio initiatives to low-bandwidth e-mail centres and networks, to high-bandwidth VSAT installations with networked computers and to (most often) some combination of these. Whatever the technical configuration may be, telecentres are An e-mail centre of PFnet, globally directed towards community building, and they achieve this by facilitating increased access to empowering information and more effective and timely communication. They may be located in a range of settings, such as dedicated premises, community centres, schools, community development organisations, or cooperative businesses.

Using this broad definition, examples of Pacific telecentres include: • Community radio initiatives in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Vanuatu and Fiji, each focussing on communication of important public-education messages such as HIV/AIDS; • Standalone telecentres located in two community development organisations in PNG; • Community-based telecentres in Maori communities of New Zealand; • Networks of e-mail centres that communicate between remote communities through short-wave radio. The People First Network of Solomon Islands is the best known telecentre initiative

Solomon Islands

Credit: Pacific Network

in the Pacific, with seventeen e-mail stations linked to an Internet café hub located in the capital, Honiara. A similar type of network can be found in the outer islands of Yap. The promoter of this initiative uses the ironic phrase ‘the last 100 miles’ to describe the telecommunications challenge. i4d | October 2005

The other networks are as follows: • A network of digital libraries in the schools of Niue; • An integrated network of telecentres with broadband connectivity scattered throughout the indigenous communities of the remote northern Cape York of Australia; • An integrated network of Indigenous Knowledge Centres, also in the Cape York region, which are a new way of being ‘library’ in the digital age; • The Pacific Open Learning Health network, which is an association of telecentres located in the major hospitals of ten Pacific Island Countries, dedicated to the on-going education of health professionals. Each of these initiatives was represented at the Pacific Telecentre Workshop, which was held in Brisbane, Australia in December 2004. There are, however, numerous other initiatives that were not represented, or which have been instigated since the workshop. Samoa has two major projects underway, a ‘schools online’ project and a network of community telecentres. The government of Fiji’s ITC Services has a telecentre projects programme. Tonga is the home of ICT entrepreneurship in the Pacific, with a number of individuals implementing Internet-based businesses and activities.

from those situated in high population centres. It does not always help that much of the shared-learning is coming from the more populous parts of the world. At the Workshop, the proposal has been taken for establishment of a support network, an online community, through which telecentre initiatives could share ideas and information, resources and skills from within the region. The proposed network was dubbed ‘PacTOC’, the Pacific Telecentre Online Community.

Pacific regionalism – cooperation within diversity Notwithstanding the diversity of the Pacific region, with small populations spread over a wide area, it is crucial for Pacific Island Countries to work cooperatively at regional level. While not reaching the extent of European integration, regionalism is nevertheless alive and well in the Pacific. The Pacific is well served by a number of

From isolated community to online community The Pacific region is characterised by diversity. There is little commonality, for example, between an outer-island community in Yap, a highland village in Papua New Guinea, and a Samoan community in urban New Zealand. It makes no more sense to speak of ‘Pacific’ culture than it does to speak of ‘Asian’ culture. With respect to ICT and allied infrastructure, different Pacific Island Countries are each at different stages of development. Take PNG as a case in point. The population of PNG is one of the most heterogeneous in the world. PNG has several thousand separate communities, most with only a few hundred people. The diversity of these communities is illustrated by the local languages. There are more than 700 indigenous languages and only 350-450 of these are related. The remainder are completely unrelated to all others. Very many of the villages scattered through PNG have no telecommunications services whatsoever although, in the literal sense, jungle drums are telecommunication devices. Some communities are fortunate to have a single HF-radio phone. The larger population centres have basic fixed telephone services and a fortunate few have mobile services. The best-connected people in PNG are those from very elite groups who have access to satellite technology. “It might not look much from the outside, but when you go inside the world is at your fingertips”. This is the catch-cry of a small, community-based telecentre in a town called Wewak, capital of the East Sepik province. The host NGO, HELP Resources, established the telecentre in 2001. HELP needed telecommunications to support its own operations, and the telecentre has become an important tool in its community development work. HELP also saw the opportunity to extend access to this telecommunications facility to the community it serves, and in doing so, the telecentre could also return some funds to the NGO. Telecentre initiatives in remote, sparsely populated communities such as those in the Pacific face particular challenges, are different October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

A centre of the Cape York Digital Network, Australia Credit: Pacific Network

regional inter-governmental organisations that make up the Council of Regional Organisations in the Pacific (CROP). CROP is an interorganisational consultative process which aims to prevent overlaps or gaps appearing between the programmes of its members. CROP heads of organisations meet once each year, but the main consultative work is done by sectoral working groups. These working groups are responsible for collaboratively working on various regional projects and policy initiatives. For example, the CROP ICT Working Group has shepherded the Pacific Islands ICT Policy and Strategic Plan (PIIPP). The ICT-sector efforts of these Pacific regional organisations are further supplemented by the regional outposts of various UN agencies. There is a groundswell of engagement and activity from a number of less formal regional organisations and networks that are becoming increasingly influential drivers of ICT innovation at all levels. These include the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society, (on a per capita basis, PICISOC is the largest and most active chapter of ISOC); the Oceania regional network of the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP-O), and the Pacific-WSIS group. While not the largest of GKP’s regional networks, the Oceania network is, arguably, the one with the greatest sense of ‘community’

PacTOC was envisioned to be an online resource and knowledgesharing centre to support the establishment, sustainability, upscaling and replication of development-oriented, community telecentres in the Pacific. among its members. Other non-governmental organisations that operate at regional level include the Foundation for Development Cooperation (FDC) and the Sasakawa Pacific Island Nations Fund/Digital Opportunity project (PIDO). It is in light of this culture of ‘cooperation within diversity’ that Pacific telecentre stakeholders were confident that a regional online community could be successful.

Establishing PacTOC PacTOC was envisioned to be an online resource and knowledgesharing centre to support the establishment, sustainability, upscaling and replication of development-oriented, community telecentres in the Pacific. It is an inspiring vision, but establishing PacTOC has been a slow process thus far, and we are not there yet. It involves a number of key challenges: community organising (through both electronic and conventional means), the technical ability to develop and maintain tools to support the online interactions of the members of the community, financial resources to support this technical development, and the ability to discern useful content and to be willing and able to share this. PacTOC has floundered on the third of these challenges. The financial resources needed to support the development of a sophisticated online platform were not available to the PacTOC stakeholders, even with the commitment of organisations such as FDC, GKP-O, PIDO and UNESCO New Zealand. The stakeholders want something more than just another ICT4D website from which they can download yet more over-sized PDF documents. Thankfully, ‘great minds think alike’. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), which has been involved in telecentre initiatives all over the world for many years, also realised there was need for regional support of otherwise isolated telecentre initiatives. IDRC has established a programme called ‘telecentre.org’. Funding for telecentre.org comes from IDRC, SDC and Microsoft Corporation. The aim of telecentre.org coincides exactly with that of PacTOC. The Executive Director of GKP realised that PacTOC would be a likely ‘client’ of the telecentre.org project. IDRC is a fellow member of GKP, and the formal connection was made at the recent

GKP annual meeting in Cairo. Pacific telecentre stakeholders will now be able to leverage IDRC’s online-community development efforts and thereby reduce the cost of developing PacTOC, which has been the major obstacle to its development. The remaining tasks for the establishment of PacTOC include: • Undertaking a sub-regional training program to empower selected Pacific nationals to be ‘telecentre champions’ and to undertake participatory consultations regarding PacTOC. It is envisaged that training will be held in three geographic centres to train at least one national from each country, and more from the larger population countries, as travel costs allow; • Facilitating a coordinated programme of national consultations and information gathering, utilising the telecentre champions mentioned above to populate the PacTOC environment with resources and people; • Launch of PacTOC; • Monitoring and evaluation.

Conclusion Improvements in telecommunications services and ICT now provide increasing opportunities for Pacific Island Countries to overcome the barriers of distance, remoteness and diversity. Community telecentres are helping to connect island communities with each other, with their Diaspora communities and with the wider world. However, without some form of ongoing coordination and support, these initiatives are likely to continue to struggle as isolated entities. PacTOC, which is founded on the willingness of Pacific Islanders to cooperate and to support community across the oceans, will be a vital support tool for telecentre initiatives throughout the region.

Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) Fellowship Global Knowledge Partnership’s Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) fellowships are designed to help social entrepreneurs achieve their goals from the initial idea through to project implementation and impact creation. They seek to support projects by young people who are creating impact with innovative solutions to social problems, especially those using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Development. YSEI will support fellows by providing mentorship and training programmes; networking; and seed grants up to US$15,000 per project. If you are a young social entrepreneur (age < 30) from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Philippines and Malaysia in search for support and opportunities, please visit www.globalknowledge.org/ ysei or www.futureshifters.net to learn more and submit your proposal by 31st October 2005. Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) is a Global Knowledge Partnership(GKP) Youth Programme supported by the Swiss Agency for Development andCooperation (SDC). Its partners include MITRA, OrphanIT, TakingITGlobal, Young Asia Television (YA*TV), Philippines Resources for Sustainable Development (PRSD), Development Research Network (D.Net) with Thai Rural Net (TRN) as the initiative’s lead.

i4d | October 2005

S OMOS @T ELECENTROS

Evolution of a regional telecentre network Somos@Telecentros is a part of TELELAC project managed by ChasquiNet Foundation to investigate telecentres status and needs and to initiate a telecentre network.

Karin Delgadillo Karin@Chasquinet.org

Klaus Stoll Klaus@Chasquinet.org ChasquiNet Foundation Ecuador

In the beginning No telecentre can be an island. Experience and common sense tell us that telecentre sustainability, defined as social, cultural, political, technological, and financial can not be achieved without networking and knowledge sharing among telecentres. To make the work of telecentres more effective and to reach their aims they need to organise themselves by overlapping national, regional and international networks. Somos@telecentros is important for three reasons: first, it allows telecentres to share insight and experience, increasing their effectiveness and chances of success. Secondly, it allows them to share resources, and to get access to resources more easily. Finally, these networks need to engage actively in public policy debates and organisation is a key step towards this. This is the story of the evolution so far of somos@telecentros (www.tele-centros.org) the regional network of telecentres in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In 1999, the TELELAC project (www.chasquinet.org/telelac) was established for a two-year period to investigate telecentres’ current status, dimensions and needs, collect their stories, produce a number of online resources and initiate a network of telecentres in the region. The TELELAC project was managed by ChasquiNet Foundation from Quito, Ecuador, and funding was provided by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). Out of the TELELAC project, the somos@telecentros (S@T) network developed and grew in strength and relevance in response to practical problems that were diagnosed among telecentres.

Development of the network The network developed and grew through:

October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

• Sharing experience and resources • Expanding current activities and negotiating new alliances • Undertaking collective evaluation and learning • Consolidating effective business models for telecentres • Collaborating on the production of appropriate tools and information resources • Developing training material and support for telecentre operators and users • Advocating for a strong telecentre role in local, national, and international policy and decision-making. The key results of the first phase of the project, which went far beyond the initial objectives and expectations, included among others the: • Creation of a regional network of telecentres, S@T, with over 600 active participants, 1500 registered telecentres, and a growing presence and influence in the region • Creation of a virtual library and resources centre of telecentre-related materials • Moderation of several online discussion lists for information exchange between telecentre practitioners and researchers in the region • Organisation of eight national and one regional meeting of telecentre practitioners • Participation in numerous ICT related meetings and workshops in the region and internationally • Compilation and publication of telecentre stories • Creation and distribution of specialised toolkits for training and operation of telecentres • Creation and distribution of Open Source (Linux) software for telecentre operation

Credit: ChaquiNet Foundation

• Design and test of telecentre impact assessment methodology • Publication of ‘State of the Art of Telecentres in LAC’.

The next step forward: TELELAC II Since its inception, S@T network had quickly become the place for activism, information, education, networking, resources, lobbying efforts and communication for telecentre issues in LAC. S@T has placed the complex issues surrounding telecentres on the regional public policy agenda. The network also began working globally, linking with a variety of international organisations to promote and support the work of telecentres around the world. But the network still faced major challenges that had to be addressed. In this order, S@T proposed a second phase for the project called TELELAC II which was financially supported by IDRC and ICA from Canada. ChasquiNet was charged with the execution of the TELELAC II project. The general aims of the TELELAC II project were to strengthen the LAC network of telecentres that was created in the first phase of the project, and to expand, strengthen, and consolidate digital inclusion initiatives, with a specific focus on telecentre activities in the LAC region. A key project premise is the idea that social transformation is, among other things, a product of the self transformation of the agents involved. Community based telecentres see themselves as agents of social transformation, but one of the key lessons learned in the first phase of TELELAC was that no social transformation can take place if it is not based on personal transformation of community telecentre leadership and staff. Experiences made by the S@T community suggest that those telecentres committed to collective and self development in their overall strategy tend to be the projects with the most lasting social impacts.

Key topics of TELELAC II: Network and telecentre sustainability Community-based telecentres are vitally linked to the socio-political, cultural and economic resources of their communities. Planning the sustainability of their work in the community must provide for the growth of these links for them to maintain their relevance and legitimacy – otherwise, a telecentre may have financial resources

but its relationship to the community might not provide conditions for its continuity or effectiveness. What was learnt by S@T in TELELAC 1 was put into practice, evaluated, documented and disseminated widely in TELELAC II. The outcomes of TELEAC II aided both the individual telecentres and the S@T network overall. Some examples: • Addressing the concept of telecentre sustainability overall: ChasquiNet developed the TC-Toolkit Sustainability 1.0. It is a toolkit for telecentres with solutions about sustainability in the four axes: political, social, economical and technological. This multimedia product has visual concept based on the typical image of a South American village. The village has different spaces where people share their questions and resources around the community telecentre. In the offices, political sustainability is discussed, in the computer shop all technical questions are addressed, the theatre shows multimedia documents of telecentre experiences and in the school, training courses are available. The library contains numerous telecentre resources, at the market stall all one needs to know about e-Commerce - creating a business plan and micro enterprises. At the Amusement arcade one can test ones overall telecentre sustainability knowledge in a game called ‘Telecenters Snakes and Ladders’, to name just some of the elements available in the toolkit. The toolkit is currently disseminated freely as a CD but an on-line version will be available at the S@T website in the near future. • Addressing social sustainability: TC-Toolkit telecentres for all ChasquiNet developed the toolkit called ‘Telecentres for all’, in Spanish: “Telecentros para tod@s” with SACI (Rede SACI Solidariedade, Apoio, Comunicação e Informação) based in Brazil. This toolkit is in two languages: Spanish and Portuguese. “Telecentres for all” give tools, information, documents, links, software and all the support for disability people in community telecentres. The main objective of this toolkit is to enable operators to understand the needs and tools available to give disabled users access to the Telecenter facilities (http://www.tele-centros.org/ discapacitados/index.es.html).

Community based telecentres see themselves as agents of social transformation, but one of the key lessons learned in the first phase of TELELAC was that no social transformation can take place if it is not based on personal transformation of community telecentre leadership and staff. i4d | October 2005

• Adressing technical sustainability: Toolkit for telecentres with Open Source Software, ChasquiNet developed the TC-Toolkit 2.0. with the objective to show the possibilities that telecentres have to use Open Source Software. It contains all one needs to know and the software needed to run a telecentre on Open Source Software. This toolkit has been disseminated as a CD through S@T Network but is also available online at http://telecentros.org/tc-toolkit2.0/. • Addressing political sustainability: Public policies and regulations manual in ICTs for community telecentres. ChasquiNet has been working on public policies and regulations in ICTs for community telecentres since approximately six years. This initiative was seen as a transversal axis for S@T network. ChasquiNet began a discussion process with the members of S@T and produced an important diagnostic about knowledge that people in the region had about this topic. A working group facilitated the discussion and the investigation with S@T members, mainly with telecentre operators. After that, ChasquiNet offered the first on-line training course about public policies and regulations for telecentre operators of the region. A simple electronic list was used but soon it turned out that not only telecentre operators but also representatives from the governmental and private sectors were very interested and participated. Out of the on-line training course a manual that reflects the experiences and knowledge collected during the investigation and the course, was developed. It is available on-line at http://www.tele-centros.org/politicas/manualpoliticas publicas.htm. • Addressing individual telecentre sustainability through the on-line resource centre cooperative mechanisms of research, learning and experimentation, and the dissemination of best practices and results. The telecentres in the LAC region need practical and efficient support in all the aspects of their operation. The S@T Resources Centre is constantly expanded and enhanced in response to the growing needs of its participants. There is already a great deal of research into telecentres and telecentre management, but too often it is cut off from actual practitioners, their experiences and their needs. There is a ‘clergy-laity’ distinction in this field that prevents the real tacit knowledge of people on the coalface from being written up and shared. Likewise, the research done by academics is too often only of theoretical interest, without offering real help to people in the field. The special strength of S@T is its link with actual practitioners in the field, across the LAC region but also its academic competence. S@T conducts a research methodology that integrates the practical and the academic competences into a research process based on social analysis and gender perspective, because it believes that ‘action-research’ by actual practitioners in conjunction with academic assistance is the best way to move both practical and general knowledge forward. • Addressing network sustainability: As a network of connections across the entire LAC region, S@T is an excellent example of ‘social capital’. Even if the network objectives in policy, research, etc. were abandoned, the network would still offer a vital conduit of information, resources and cooperation to its members, and in October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

time it has become one of the most important organisations working with ICT in the LAC region. The network - as a voluntary association of people from all of Latin America and the Caribbean and from all walks of life, who share an interest in using ICTs, and in working together in an equitable way - is a unique creation in the history of the region, and represents an entirely new kind of animal. Sustainability is not something that tends to happen by accident, either for individual telecentres, or for an umbrella organisation. S@T needed to focus on this priority, by taking the time to develop a strategic plan for revenue generation. In the first years of the project, S@T had learnt and experienced that a network such as S@T not only can be self-sustainable but also has to be self-sustainable in order to be relevant to its members and its partners. The second lesson S@T had learnt is that the network has a good potential to generate revenue for its own maintenance and the benefit of its members and partners. The network has accumulated a richness of expertise, knowledge and research that is attractive to the private and governmental sectors and already a number of approaches have been made from these sectors towards the network to seek its assistance in their digital inclusion projects against hard cash.

Credit: ChaquiNet Foundation

S@T today S@T is now incorporated as a registered NGO with regional character in Ecuador. Its governance structure was defined at the third regional S@T meeting in Sao Paulo, 2004. During the meeting, all S@T members elected either in person or on-line its Board, consisting of a President, a Secretary and 5 members. The S@T board is responsible to guide the processes and dynamics of the network with the support of the national S@T networks. The waste majority of the LAC countries now have a national S@T network and some of them like Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia and Chile have held national meetings. In order to maintain a horizontal and not top down governance structure the S@T network used a number of topic related discussion lists that allow all members to participate in the decision making processes.

S@T today operates independently from outside funding as a network with over 3700 members. The guiding principles of the network are: • Self transformation is a pre requisite for social transformation • Telecentres need to be community driven • A culture of support and solidarity • Participatory and all members on an equal footing • Action, reflection and action • Learning by doing • Promote leadership enhancement • Awareness and imagination • Solidarity and active transparency

Challenges The old challenges such as articulation of national and regional actions, training and influencing public policies, sustainability strategies, connectivity issues, monitoring and evaluation, strengthening the exchange of resources, experiences, ideas and knowledge remain and have to be pursuit further but also new challenges developed. One of the results of the success of telecentre networks such as S@T is that international development organisations are pressing for the creation of similar networks in other regions and eventually the creation of a global network. Whilst these efforts may be well

Credit: ChaquiNet Foundation

intentioned, they are not included on an equal partner basis. The telecentre practitioners and their existing networks on the ground and the sustainable horizontal structures are being replaced with unsustainable artificial vertical structures imposed from the outside. These efforts also ignore existing realities that have been created by the telecentre networks themselves. S@T had to learn that even a regional network in many cases is not large enough to respond to the needs of the telecentre users. In the case of Ecuador, for example, an estimated 1/3 of the adult population is living as migrants in North America and Europe and in many cases telecentres in north and south are the main instrument of communication between family members. S@T reacted to this situation by being an initiator and founding member of the Telecenters of the Americas Partnership (TAP).

The old challenges of telecentre networks such as articulation of national and regional actions, training and influencing public policies, sustainability strategies, connectivity issues, monitoring and evaluation, strengthening the exchange of resources, experiences, ideas and knowledge remain and further but also new challenges developed. The alliance between the Aspira Association, Pacific Community Networks Association (PCNA), ChasquiNet Foundation and Somos@Telecentros to study the costs and benefits of greater integration among the myriad of regional telecentres that have emerged across North and South America. All of the organisations involved have created strong networks of telecentres in their respective regions. TAP seeks to examine and share best practices between countries, streamline workload and costs, enabling individual technology centres to maximise resources and, ultimately, serve their communities better. This coalition represents over 10,000 telecentres throughout North, Central and South America, and the Caribbean serving over 20 million people. Working collectively, TAP can empower millions of individuals and their families. The agreement calls for the team to develop a system that provides easy access to the best telecentre tools and resources; the production of a comprehensive survey of major relevant telecentre activities in the Americas; and the creation of a long-term plan outlining the optimal structure, activities, and budget for an effective TAP partnership. The long-term plan includes establishing best practices for sharing programmes and tools, coordinating content development and distribution, co-sponsoring research, and cultivating solid relationships among telecentre practitioners and network leaders internationally. By building relationships among representatives from participating organisations, we will leverage our resources and have a stronger voice to advocate for underserved communities. This type of collaboration will enhance economic opportunity and social development in local and regional communities throughout the Americas, which is a goal of all the organisations involved. i4d | October 2005

A FRICAN T ELECENTRE N ETWORKS

An insider perspective In several African countries, telecentres have demonstrated that it is possible to stimulate social and economic development with the use of Information and Communication Technologies.

Meddie Mayanja telecentre.org, IDRC Canada mmayanja@idrc.ca

October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

The first wave of telecentres in Africa started in the late 1990s in Mali, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania and South Africa. It was the aftermath of the first ever Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) conference in Toronto, Canada and the rise of digital divide initiatives. The telecentre approach presented an opportunity for addressing the digital divide and spur social development in developing countries. A telecentre is a public place where people can access information and communication tools like radios, computers, Internet and other technologies that help in gathering information and communication with others. While each telecentre is different, the common focus is on the use of technologies to support community and social development – reducing isolation, bridging the digital divide, promoting health issues, creating economic opportunities, reaching out to people with special needs including youths. Africa has been graced by several telecentre models, most notable of them are as follows; • Community Multi-purpose Telecentres (MCTs), • School-based Telecentres (SBTs), • Community Technology Learning Centres (CTLCs), • Digital Villages (DVs), • Community Learning and Information Centres (CLIC), • Community Multi-media Centres (CMCs). In several African countries, telecentres have demonstrated that it is possible to stimulate social development with use of ICTs. In Senegal for example, communities are using cellular phones to collect and

distribute market prices thereby helping thousands of farmers to make informed decisions on where to sale their produce. In Mozambique, community radios are used to mobilise the communities in Chockwe and Xinavane. Students use school-based telecentres to access learning resources in Uganda, Rwanda and Zimbabwe. Hundreds of other ways in which telecentres have been utilised can be cited. It is important to note that most of the telecentre models in Africa have been designed with support of development partners and civil society organisations. In the early periods, most active

Telecentre planning meeting in Mozambique

development partners in this area included International Telecommunication Unit (ITU), International Development Research Centre (IDRC), UNESCO, World Bank and USAID. However, in some countries governments launched large-scale telecentre investments like in South Africa through the Universal Service Agency (USA) and most recently in Ghana. While this brought with it diversity of telecentre models it also made sharing of resources amongst the different telecentre models a key challenge. Therefore, it has always been an issue for telecentres to collectively address key challenges they face in the field even within a single country.

Studio of Chockwe telecentre in Mozambique

It is almost a decade since the first telecentre was established in Africa. Certainly the impact of telecentres would have been much more profound if key challenges like connectivity, staff development, content development, access to appropriate equipment and learning from experience were collectively addressed.

Attempts at addressing the problem African community telecentre champions would soon realise the potential benefits for sharing resources beyond human networking and solidarity that had already developed thanks to a series of digital divide events on the continent that brought together key stakeholders. With a telecentre network, it would be easy for telecentres to address issues of common interest like connectivity, training, advocacy, attracting private sector support, telecentre survival and sustainability and general fundraising programmes. As early as 1999, informal discussions had started to create an African telecentre support structure. During the same time, the ACACIA programme of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) was in process of evolving guidelines for monitoring and evaluating telecentres in Africa and brought together telecentre practitioners and researchers across the continent. Discussions on setting up Pan-African Telecentre Evaluation Framework would consequently start off in Nairobi, Kenya during in the same year leading to comprehensive study. In April 2002 the IDRC, UNESCO, IICD and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs collaborated to convene the first everglobal meeting to discuss the creation of a ‘telecentre helpdesk and knowledge clearinghouse’ at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France. More than twenty telecentre leaders and practitioners from Latin America, Asia and Africa attended the meet 3-day meeting. Participants discussed the importance of telecentre networks and resolved to form regional (aka. continental) networks that would merge to form a global telecentre network. Our colleagues from Latin America had already established the ‘Somos telecetros’ by then and therefore had a leap-pad to a regional network. It was practically different for Africa as there was nothing on the ground. The spirit and commitment to telecentre networking defined in Paris would be strengthened at an ACACIA ICT African conference

held in Kwa Maritane, South Africa in May 2003. The event provided an opportunity for community telecentre leaders to evaluate commitment and assess extent at which the outcomes of Paris had been implemented. UNESCO and IDRC agreed to sponsor an action-oriented meeting that would help African telecentre leaders to define the structure, functions and resources of a telecentre helpdesk. The planning meeting was held at Hotel Cardoso in Maputo, Mozambique in September 2003. It drew participation of leading telecentre practitioners in Africa and civil society organisations working with or for telecentres. A representative also attended the meeting from Latin American telecentre network. UNESCO and IDRC were also represented at the meeting. Maputo meeting was the most critical event in the creation of the African telecentre support structure that would be named African Telecentre Helpnet (ATH) to signify the adopted strategy of creating multitudes of national and sub-regional helpdesks that would weave into a single continental helpnet. It was agreed that because of the diversities in Africa, it was not possible to implement an African telecentre organ without strong national network – a fundamental shift in the decision of Paris strategy. The meeting defined a high-level ATH mission as ‘to establish a mechanism and structure to respond rapidly to problems and challenges faced by telecentres and ICT access centres in…Africa’. In addition to enumerating a number of services possible, the Maputo Action Plan emphasised the importance of multi-lingualism as well as use of varied technologies and media.

Initial telecentre networks and the challenges One of the major outcomes of Maputo meeting was a commitment by African community telecentre leaders and practitioners to mobilise colleagues in respective countries and launch appropriate helpdesk services at the national level. Members were encouraged to use available structures and resources and also target to expand membership to the group to the extent possible. Thanks to tremendous personal sacrifices by the team especially Polly Gaster,

Record keeping of UgaBYTES i4d | October 2005

Jonnie Akakpo, Peter Benjamin, Sarah Parkinson and Sandra Roberts, we got some actions off the group albeit with commendable challenges. UgaBYTES Initiative, which is a not-for-profit organisation in Uganda, has been established in 2001 to provide community telecentres with mentoring and support services. The organisation would then scale up services in 2003 to spearhead implementation of Maputo Action plan with tremendous support of the rest of community telecentre leaders around the continent. More often than not operational issues and difficulties would be discussed and shared on-line demonstrating solidarity across the continent and keeping the telecentre ‘Helpnet’ concept alive. Elsewhere in Mozambique, Polly Gaster rallied local initiatives within the framework of the Community Multi-media Centres (CMCs). Sylvestre Ouedraogo with Association Yam Pukri in Burkina Faso was running a mailing list of telecentre practitioners that would provide online peer support. In South Africa, the Community Information Network for Southern Africa (CINSA) was actively pulling together a project to support community ICT projects in the SADC region through networking, training, service brokerage, technical support and assisting with project evaluation. CINSA undertook a study of ICT in the SADC region as a basis for its programming. In the overall, there was varied success across the continent. Most notable of which was the consolidation of solidarity and advocacy for telecentres that would later prove vital to continued telecentre activity. It became also too clear that even national telecentre networks would not be easy to achieve without sustained effort, additional resources, dedicated telecentre network building structures and partnerships. Additionally, all the proponents were already working with broader ICT for development programmes where national community telecentre networking would feature as extra voluntary workload. For instance Jonnie Akakpo, one of the strongest supporters of the concept, was involved with CITRED in Ghana. In the overall, a commitment had already been tested in action in technology convergence environment and that what counts.

The ultimate lifeline When the African telecentre team was struggling to keep the spirit alive, Microsoft Unlimited Potential started a parallel process – consulting key players around the world – towards setting up a ‘Global CTLC Support Network’. It immediately became apparent that the African Telecentre ‘Helpnet’ benefit from the initiative by tapping into broader human networks and resources. Telecentre leaders chose to welcome the initiative and participate in the consultation process that was conducted in 2003-04. IDRC would later partner with Microsoft Unlimited Potential in one of the most critical private-public partnership in ICT4D sub-sector. The Global CTLC Support Network would then become the telecentre.org programme at IDRC. The telecentre.org programme will become a year old in March 2006. The overall mission of telecentre.org is to build and support the capacity of people who lead and work in telecentres around the world. October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

Job list prepared by UgaBYTES for supporting telecentres

UgaBYTES Initiative has been established in 2001 to provide community telecentres with mentoring and support services. The organisation would then scale up services in 2003 to spearhead implementation of Maputo Action plan with tremendous support of the rest of community telecentre leaders around the continent. African telecentre networking initiatives now have an opportunity to develop practical strategies in the view that telecentre.org at IDRC will be a worthy partner along the way. Earlier in August-September this, telecentre.org was involved in a number of national telecentre building activities in South Africa, Mozambique and Uganda. The broad plan of telecentre.org is to support establishment of a national telecentre network in Mozambique, a telecentre trainer’s network in South Africa and strengthen UgaBYTES Initiative in Uganda as a national telecentre network. By the close of 2005, project support for the three countries will be finalised. Additionally, similar plans will be developed for French West Africa and Arab North.

E MERGING T ELECENTRE M OVEMENT

S RI L ANKA

Birth of a movement Sri Lanka enters into a new era with Dr Harsha Liyanage the emergence Sarvodaya of new ICT Sri Lanka landscape all over harsha_liyanage@yahoo.com the rural sector, where 80 percent of the population inhabited. Mushrooming ICT kiosks – named as Telecentres and Nana-salas, add the difference. For the community who were literate enough (92 percent) to recognise the global trends of information age, this is a dream coming true. In 1996, the 48 year old leading NGO of the country, Sarvodaya started their pilot experiments on Telecentres, as an early response to emerging digital divide. Pioneering efforts at ‘Kahawatta’ Telecentres was a huge new challenge. Let alone electricity and hardware problems, sustaining computers through the monsoon thunder strikes was a big challenge. Nevertheless, over the years, organisation had developed a unique model to pass benefits of Information and Communication Technologies to rural communities, without trapping them into economic Credit: www.unesco.org pit falls. Today, it has a big network of 31 Telecentres serving to hundreds of Village Information Centres (VIC) all around Sri Lanka. Model is such that the information demands at the rural community is being served through the VICs, which are connected to the Telecentres through ‘human interfaces’ – the mobile youth. ICT mobile unit and Learning Resource Center sensitise extreme illiterate communities. At the research front, usage of digital equipment are being tested with WiFi connectivity options to match the newly emerging community demands. Government lead ‘eSriLanka’ programme, commenced since 2000, started leap frogging the NGO effort. With the vision of using ICT for peace, growth and poverty alleviation, eSriLanka is engaged with establishing a network of 1000 Nana-salas all across rural landscape. Model envisages different scales (e.g. 4 computers to 10 computers per centre) to match the varying demands of the locality. Business model integrates sustainability by bringing in local entrepreneurs, mostly youth, as the driving force of the Nana-sala. Tele-communication back bone is expected to provide minimum of 512 Kbps connectivity to enable smooth browsing. Services of e-Governance, e-Commerce, local content are expected to serve the local community needs enabling them to break the shackles of poverty.

In a small country of 19 million population, having GDP per capita just reached 1000 US$, mega project investments face a big challenge of economic recovery. Prevailing ethnic conflict and high poverty (26 percent) further challenge the sustainability prospects of the ambitious network of Nana-salas. eSriLanka was careful to recognise the risk, hence worked out an interesting option – a ‘subsidy voucher’. A ‘voucher’ had been designed to stimulate rural community to become instant Nana-sala customers. As it is distributed freely (yet on demand), targeting two community groups - youth as the core group and adult (including women) as a secondary group. Pilot results proved high prospects. Vouchers could generate a huge influx of youth around every pilot Nanasala, and interestingly could improve the women attendance significantly over a quick time period. As a result, voucher programme is being launched at national scale, by now. Versatility of the eSriLanka model enabled quick opening of tailor made Nana-salas at IDP (Internally Displaced People’s) camps along the cost, just after the tsunami disaster. At Sarvodaya, Telecentres were converted into disaster management centers, enabling efficient delivery of relief services. Information management was at the best, when all the global community rushed to help the devastated livelihoods. Telecentres have paved the way for Sri Lanka to recognise the importance of multi-stake holder partnerships. University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), who had been a pioneer of introducing ICT to Sri Lanka, partners with Credit: www.unesco.org Sarvodaya to research on introducing WiFi networking at rural virtual villages. NGOs such as CENWOR (Center for Womens Research), World View Sri Lanka works along with eSriLanka to enable e-Society through Nana-salas. Private sector companies such as Spectrum Pvt Ltd and CeyCom Pvt Ltd., share their expertise along with Sarvodaya to support realising eSriLanka ambitions. ICT has become a common ambition of all. Interestingly, ICT kiosk operators are recognising the value of sharing. The recent workshop held at Sarvodaya with the collaboration of eSriLanka, under the sponsorship of ‘telecentres.org’ of International Development Research Centre (IDRC), was the first ever common gathering of all the ICT kiosk operators of the country. Over hundred participants expressed a common wish when they lit the ‘circle of oil lamps’ (symbol of wisdom sharing) that is to build up a strong network of Telecentres – in order to enlighten the communities all around Sri Lanka. This gave birth to a Telecentre movement. i4d | October 2005

P ORTRAIT telecentre.org telecentre.org is a new collaborative initiative involving telecentres, networks, innovators, social investors and others with a stake in the telecentre community. It is built on the belief that locally driven technology initiatives can empower individuals and strengthen communities. Based at Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), telecentre.org will invest in activities that directly benefit grassroots telecentres and that bolster the telecentre movement globally. A special emphasis will be placed on the creation and strengthening of networks that help people in the telecentre movement to gather, share information and support each other. An initial social investment to support the creation of telecentre.org has been provided by IDRC, the Microsoft Unlimited Potential Program and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). This month’s ‘portrait’ section provides a profile of the telecentre.org program. It includes information from the telecentre.org web site, an overview of the online strategy behind the program and an interview with telecentre.org managing director Mark Surman.

From the telecentre.org website... Telecentres, telecottages, village knowledge centres, CTCs, telehuts, community multimedia centres: whatever they’re called, wherever they are, people gather in them to share technology, use the Internet, learn new skills, tackle local social issues, face common challenges, and empower their communities. They are part of a vibrant worldwide movement. telecentre.org exists to build bridges within this movement, connecting people working in telecentres around the world. We’re about sharing knowledge and learning together. We’re about reinforcing a global movement by finding ways that people, communities and networks can connect over common issues. We’re about telecentres getting stronger and better, together. The telecentre.org program is built on the belief that networks are the key to strengthening telecentres – networks that help people working in telecentres to share resources, improve skills and innovate services. Telecentres working together can: • improve their own financial strength, technical know-how, and management abilities, to serve more people in better ways • develop and share new social enterprise models, training methods and community services, for telecentres and networks to adapt and use easily • share information and learning on key issues like business planning, fundraising, outreach, and community development. We want telecentres to be stronger, more vibrant and better at what they do. We want to help fuel a global movement that innovates together. We want communities to join the information society on their own terms. That’s what telecentre.org is about.

innovation. Things that make telecentres easier to run, and better for users. telecentre.org also offers support services directly to networks, such as event facilitators from existing grassroots networks, business planning coaches with experience in social enterprise, and web site tools that assist in the creation of online communities. Knowing that networks need nurturing and facilitation, we believe that services like these are essential to helping networks thrive. The services are offered on a low cost or no cost basis to telecentres anywhere in the world. At a global level, telecentre.org connects national networks to each other, highlights the best telecentre news and training materials, and generally shines a light of the good work of telecentres around the world. This is done through telecentre.org events, web sites and other activities that create stronger global telecentre movement.

What does telecentre.org do? The telecentre.org program makes social investments and provides services that strengthen grassroots telecentre networks. These networks give people managing telecentres the raw materials they need to succeed: training, support, marketing and technology. They also help telecentre people to learn and innovate together, to make technology more useful for the communities they serve. telecentre.org social investments are provided to networks working at the national or regional level. These investments furnish telecentre people with financial resources to come together, and to build the friendships and trust that make networks possible. The investments also underwrite costs of new network-based services for telecentres: training programs, support lines, knowledge sharing, October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

“Telecentre sustainability requires a balanced approach of both financial and developmental goals”

Mark Surman Managing Director, Telecentre Support Network, telecentre.org msuman@idrc.ca

telecentre.org is a new initiative aimed at building the capacity of people working in telecentres around the world. The main way we do this is by supporting networks that provide support, training and information sharing services to telecentres in a particular country or region. This support for networks includes a combination of social investments and support services.

Which countries are in the focus of your work in the initial years? At this stage, we know that we will be supporting networks in Chile, India, Mozambique, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Uganda. We’ll also be supporting regional networking across the Americas. These are all places where there is tremendous energy and potential in the telecentre movement, and networks can help amplify this. Of course, we’ll also be working globally at the same time, which mostly happens through events and websites that connect the different networks we are working with at national and regional levels. How do you foresee the role of a facilitating and supporting agency such as telecentre.org becoming relevant? Our relevance comes through support for the work of people who are making stuff happen on the ground, people running telecentre networks that are working at the grassroots. We want these people to thrive in their work. From there, we also interconnect and cross-pollinate between these networks. That’s our facilitating role, and it has the potential to really accelerate the kind of movement building needed to scale up and evolve the telecentre concept. A good example of this is our work with Mission 2007 in India. In that case, we are providing resources that will help the Indian telecentre movement to dramatically improve its capacity building programmes. The result will be an ability to train the tens of thousands – or maybe even hundreds of thousands – of new telecentre operators that will be needed in India to meet the goals of the Mission 2007 alliance. Also worth noting, the curriculum and learning that comes out of this process will be made available in other countries as well. In what ways are you going to harness the existing expertise around the world? The telecentre.org programme is based on the principle that the most important expertise will come from telecentre practitioners working on the ground. That is where the real innovation and learning is happening, but that learning and innovation is rarely shared.

So, our job is not to ‘tap’ expertise, but rather to facilitate connections among all of these grassroots experts around the world. We do this by supporting networks, by holding participatory events and by building up online communities. Our hope is that this will create stronger sense of collective intelligence within the telecentre movement, that people will know how to tap into the expertise of their peers. This is the best kind of expertise you can have. How does your organisation help the communities to develop the required skills for telecentres to be a sustainable and revenue generating proposition? Telecentre sustainability is a complex matter, and requires a balanced approach that looks at both financial and development goals. So, one thing we can do is to make sure is that we help telecentre operators develop the skills to strike this balance, that we help them to become successful social entrepreneurs. The training we’re supporting in a number of countries is focused on exactly this issue. We can also do action research that looks at new approaches to social enterprise in the telecentre movement. We are looking at ways to do this kind of research with some of the leading entrepreneurial kiosk organisations in India, and with a leading social enterprise group in Chile called NeSST. In the long term, how can the skill development activities of telecentre.org be useful to the communities associated with the same? We are not doing skills development directly, we are supporting networks on the ground that do this – and we are doing everything we can to help these networks become vibrant and resilient. Hopefully, these networks will be offering skills development to the telecentre community in their country for many years to come. And, more importantly, they will be doing this in a way that evolves with and adapts to the changing needs of the telecentres they are serving … and the needs of the communities where these telecentres are located. If you are looking at the long term as you suggest, there is also something around the approach to skills development that is being used. Our belief is that participatory training and ongoing community learning provide the best way to transfer and innovate skills. We are selecting partners that share this view in the hope that we can build a skills development culture based on this sort of participatory, evolutionary approach. What are your plans for the WSIS and other key international events? As I mentioned above, one of our key roles is to act as a facilitator and connecting point between telecentre networks. Events like WSIS provide us with a chance to bring these networks together, and to slowly weave a global network of networks. With this in mind, we are running a ‘telecentre leaders forum’ at WSIS. This will be a participatory workshop aimed at sharing knowledge and deepening the connections between people who are driving the telecentre movement in their own countries. We plan to keep doing events like this in the future.

i4d | October 2005

• The Americas, where the Telecentres of the Americas Partnership will create a learning exchange for telecentre operators from across the hemisphere We’re also working with a number of partners to build out global services that support the capacity of telecentre networks. This includes work with TakingITGlobal to create online ‘ecosystem’ that connects telecentre web sites in dozens of countries; and a series of workshops with NESsT that will provide social enterprise coaching and business planning support for telecentre networks. telecentre.org will continue to expand both the number of countries it is working in and the services it offers to telecentres.

From the telecentre.org online strategy... With financial support from IDRC, Microsoft and SDC, telecentre.org social investments and services are provided to networks of telecentres working together. We do not provide funding for the creation or maintenance of individual telecentres. All telecentre.org partners funding have committed to a common set of values that guide our work. These values include a focus on social mission, free knowledge sharing, transparency, collaboration and learning. They also include a firm commitment to technology neutrality. Telecentres should use the technology that they believe is most appropriate for the communities they serve. What is telecentre.org investing in first? We want to invest in a future where people running telecentres around the world are constantly connected to each other, sharing ideas, swapping resources and lending a helping hand. This is a future with vibrant telecentres in hundreds of thousands of communities are the world, and with a thriving global telecentre movement. As a starting point, we are making social investments that support the work of seven regional telecentre networks. These investments will go to: • Chile, where the ATACH network will help telecentres move beyond access and training, into new e-government and local democracy efforts • India, where the National Alliance for Mission 2007 will forge a train-the-trainer program to eventually build a pool of hundreds of thousands of skilled village knowledge workers • Mozambique, where UNESCO’s Community Multimedia Centre program and others will provide training, technical support and knowledge sharing services for telecentres across the country • South Africa, where the Universal Service Agency, Microsoft Digital Villages and SangoNet will train small telecentre operators in social enterprise development • Sri Lanka, where Sarvodaya and eSriLanka will set up a national network to connect social entrepreneurs and community organizers running telecentres • Uganda, where UgaBytes will extend the support and training services that it offers to telecentres across East Africa October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

While telecentre.org’s main aim is to built out and strengthen telecentre networks on the ground, online services will also play an important role. These online services will both help telecentre networks to serve their members at a national level and provide a way for networks to connect with each other.

With this in mind, telecentre.org had developed and begun to develop an innovative distributed online strategy. This strategy will not result in a single telecentre.org web site. Rather, it aims create a rich and resilient online ecosystem within the international telecentre movement. This will be done by creating, strengthening and connecting regional network websites around the world that are in the business of supporting telecentre operators. telecentre.org’s online strategy is designed around two key groups of stakeholders –people working in telecentres and people working in networks that support telecentres. Building on three years of research and consultation, its clear that these groups can be best served if the following things are done: • Create a team of information brokers who can answer telecentre questions, locating these brokers in networks and other NGOs. • Share current information about telecentres and the telecentre movement, promoting and celebrating the work of telecentres around the world.

• Collect the best information available for telecentres, and encourage partner networks to share this information via their own websites. • Help telecentre people collaborate, placing a special emphasis on the link between face-to-face meetings and online collaboration. • Offer online tools and content for use on telecentre network websites so networks can deliver services like the ones described above to their members. Traditionally, organizations attempt to address needs like this using a single web site. However, this sort of strategy often falls short because it doesn’t leverage existing resources or respond to differences in local realities. For this reason, telecentre.org will use a distributed strategy that supports or builds out telecentre network sites at the national level. A set of flexible tools will be created to support these national networks including: • A support.net.in.a.box for telecentre networks that need a new website (or, a website overhaul). This would provide telecentre networks with an online platform to deliver reference desk services, publish telecentre news, communicate with member telecentres and support collaboration.

Making the difference: Information and communication technologies as key enablers for equitable and sustainable development Special publication relesed by GKP during the third PrepCom 2005 at Geneva, Swizerland. The GKP is the leading international multi-stakeholder network committed to harnessing the potential of information and communication technologies (ICT) for sustainable and equitable development. Ranging from grassroots practitioners to policy-makers, GKP members and partners are innovators in the practical use of ICT for development. Through the GKP, governments, business and civil society organisations share their experience, ideas, issues and solutions to unleash the potential of ICT to improve lives, reduce poverty and empower people. While fostering meaningful exchanges and learning, GKP also provides the platform for building effective multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) to generate innovative and practical solutions to development problems, and creates opportunities for scaling up ICT initiatives and spreading their benefits. Working together, GKP members increase their organisational influence and visibility. The GKP’s activities focus on: f Convening knowledge sharing events with products and

innovative solutions f Brokering multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) for

• A collection of online tools and content for telecentre networks that already have their own web site. This would include standalone versions of the reference desk, online library, content feeds, event.in.a.box and search services that can be ‘plugged in’ to existing telecentre network web sites. Also, a set of global telecentre.org websites will be created that that highlight and promote the work of telecentres and networks around the world, and offer a generic entry point to reference desk, newsfeed, curriculum library and collaboration services. All of these online tools and websites will place a heavy emphasis on offline and low bandwidth access. A significant portion of web content will be available via RSS or e-mail for offline reading. The most popular curriculum and other documents will be released regularly on compilation CDs by telecentre.org partners. This kind of offline access will be critical for the success of telecentre.org.

knowledge sharing and increasing effectiveness of ICT for development initiatives f Promoting innovation in the use and appropriation of ICT for development initiatives and knowledge sharing f Facilitating mobilisation of investments in ICT for development at local, national, and global levels f Influencing policy, regulatory frameworks and public opinion Founded in 1997, GKP continues to grow and now comprises some 90 members from over 40 countries, covering all continents. It is governed by an elected Executive Committee and supported by a Secretariat based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Contact: Global Knowledge Partnership Lot L2-I-4, Enterprise 4 Technology Park Malaysia, Bukit Jalil 57000 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia www.globalknowledge.org gkp@gkps.org.my

i4d | October 2005

Vol. III No. 10

October 2005

Information for development w w w. i 4 d . c s d m s . i n

Education Edusat completes a year, makes IT@school a reality Edusat, India's ambitious programme to harness satellite technology to reach students in every corner of the country is being implemented by half a dozen institutions across India, while it celebrates its first anniversary on 20 September. Kerala has leveraged the telemetry potential of Edusat and linked 45 learning centres, spread across all 14 districts for two way audio and video interaction. More states are slowly creating their own infrastructure to leverage the enormous reach offered by Edusat. Source: http://www.hindu.com

Infosys to train 100 Chinese students in India Infosys Technologies Ltd has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Government of China to train 100 students from China at its Global Education Centre in the Indian city, Mysore. These students are in their fourth year from leading universities in the software engineering field. The internship programme will run from September 2005 to March 2006 and involves a three-month intensive training course on interpersonal and technical skills at the Global Education Centre, and a four-month internship at Infosys' development centre in Bangalore. Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com

e-Lessions for science students in Namibia As part of a pilot project funded by United Nations educational, scientific and cultural organisation (Unesco), the Namibian October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

College of Open Learning (Namcol) has produced a series of electronic lessons that will help students studying physical science. The electronic sessions include demonstrations, info boxes, quizzes and puzzles. Apart from making the answer checking process easy, it also brings advantages like use of animations to illustrate. The material consists of six physical science lessons and is meant to supplement textbooks and classroom instruction. Source: http://allafrica.com

IT access to schools in Hindi belt of India Around 1,250 schools situated in four of the most backward districts across the Hindi-speaking states of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in India will get connected via 12 satellite interactive terminals supported by Edusat by January 2006. With the successful implementation of this project, the government of India will come one step closer to its objective of universalisation of elementary education. The department of space, ministry of human resource development (MHRD) and Distance Education Council, Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) have jointly agreed to work on the project in collaboration with the school education departments of the respective states. Source: http://infotech.indiatimes.com

e-Governance Now lodge e-FIRs in Delhi After a two years work on the technologies, the Delhi Police have started incorporating web-based systems to enable people to lodge complaints online and cyber laboratories to ensure that no tampering is

done to evidences till they reach the courts. The project would enable police stations to come under a computer network and work as an interface with jail, courts and hospitals for better efficiency and speedy disposal of cases. The ministry of home affairs has decided to implement this project throughout the country. Source: http://timesofindia.com

Coming up e-Panchayats to strengthen e-Governance Taking e-Governance to rural India, the Andhra Pradesh state government is starting 475 e-Panchayats soon in the state with an outlay of Rs 3.32 crore. These e-Panchayats would work on the lines of the e-Seva centres, where various records of the Gram Panchayat would be computerised. Various services like issuing of birth, death certificates, details of land records among others would be provided under the project. Source: http://www.newindpress.com

Indian state starts e-Tender in public sector Orissa Construction Corporation and Orissa Bridge Construction Corporation, the two state public sector units in the Indian state Orissa are asked by the chief minister to provide detailed information of the works contracted out to private parties during the last five years in the Government website www.orissagov. nic.in. The step taken after a spate of murders and shootouts in the state over tender fixing, is intended to prepare the state for e-Tenders in order to bring in transparency in the system. Source: http://www.newindpress.com

The i4d News

Dutch under single database The Dutch government will begin tracking every citizen from cradle to grave in a single database, opening a personal electronic dossier for every child at birth with health and family data, and eventually adding school and police records. The new database is going to start from the beginning of 2007. Under this, each child will get a Citizens Service Number, making it easier to keep track of children with problems even when their families move.

Source: http://allafrica.com

Health e-Medicine through Apollo and Reliance Infocomm

Source: http://www.wired.com

e-Admission in Indian schools reduces drop-out mark The new online admission policy of Delhi Government in India for primary level schools has successfully brought down the dropout rate from 15 per cent to 5 per cent this year leading to 70,000 new admissions, of which 35,000 are girl students who never made to school beyond the fifth standard. With the introduction of the online admission system the total admission had touched the record figure of 2.10 lakh instead of the routine 1.40-lakh students joining the sixth standard in Delhi Government schools. Source: http://www.hindu.com

Agriculture India to start agri courses through ICTs As part of a new initiative of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), India is going to have a network of post-graduate teaching in food and agriculture through open distant learning (ODL) programme . The course intends to provide flexible, affordable and accessible post-graduate education building high quality capacity for agricultural development. Web-based CDRom, traditional text and other technologies will be used for different languages to cater to local needs. Courses will be imparted in almost all segments of agriculture including livestock, forestry and fisheries with a view to enhance agricultural development, reduce poverty and ensure food security. Source: http://www.financialexpress.com

Zambia farmers adopt ICT Farmers Internet Cafe, hosted by the Kabwe Farmers Association established by

o'clock news, or go back to the midnight shows and catch up with the goings at the station, thus making the Internet version a true representative of the national radio's programming.

the Zambia National Farmers Union (ZNFU), has provided the most saught after technology to the farmers with which they can now improve their production, purchasing and marketing decisions, ultimately staying connected with the rest of the world. While the Internet communication technology has been in Zambia since 1994, farmers especially small scale ones have had no opportunity to it. Recent statistics show that there were over 50,000 Internet users by 2005 compared to only 250 in 1994. Source: http://www.iicd.org

Community radio Remote India to get FM tunes for teaching As a first time attempt of FM Radio being used for teaching in India, the government of India plans 87 FM channels to be used exclusively to teach students in remote areas of the country. Of these channels in pipeline, 36 would be used by the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) to reply to queries and organise on-air classrooms. IGNOU, which has been using All India Radio (AIR) for some courses, will now use radio on a much larger scale. Source: http://www.indianexpress.com

The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Enterprises (ADAE) group company Reliance Infocomm, under its e-Medicine initiatives, is joining hands with the Chennai-based heart and lung care major Apollo Hospitals, to facilitate e-Diagnosis and treatment of heart diseases and cancer. The 240 WebWorld outlets of Reliance Infocomm will act as out patient departments (OPDs) of the Apollo Hospitals, to enable the patients seeking medical assistance from doctors. Source: http://www.businessstandard.com

Southern Indian village first to start telemedicine Aragonda, a remote hamlet in the southern Indian state Andhra Pradesh, finally got a space in the health map with the Apollo group of hospitals chosing the village for its pilot telemedicine project. The village otherwise has no medicare options till the year 2000 except a few Registered Medical Practitioners (RMPs) and one primary health centre with one doctor. It was to be the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first experiment with rural telemedicine. The village was connected to the Apollo hospitals in Hyderabad and Chennai through Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) lines bringing tertiary care virtually to the doorsteps of the villagers. Source: http://www.indianexpress.com

Radio Botswana now in digital age With the University of Botswana computer science staff, using modern technology to record Radio Botswana's daily programmes and then channelling them via the Internet, Radio Botswana joining the digital world has become a reality. The service allows one to shuffle through the programming easily. One can listen to the six o'clock news, the seven

Now drug trial data in website With a view to keep the patients updated fear-free over drug safty, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations has launched a new web (www.ifpma.org/ clinicaltrials) that gives details of clinical trials on new medicines. Source: http://www.hindu.com i4d | October 2005

The i4d News

Technology Windows XP in Indian languages now According to the joint announcement of the Chairman and Chief Software Architect of Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates, and Indian Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Dayanidhi Maran, the new launch, multilingual `Windows XP Starter Edition' can be used by people speaking any of the nine Indian languages, who may also want to use English. As per the collaborative initiatives outlined during the discussions, Apart from the new launch, Microsoft is to adopt 100 schools in six States, to start with. Microsoft would also support the Indian IT Ministry's programme to set-up one lakh rural kiosks by offering affordable products, services, consultancy, training and support. Source: http://www.hindu.com

Internet Phone to keep Namibians touch the world Skyphonics, the virtual Internet phone service has become an affordable alternative to traditional telephone services in Namibia making them more involved in sophisticated and skilful ways of enhancing their communications with the outside world. Since the introduction of Voice-Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) that entails making a normal call via the Internet connection in other parts of the world years back, many have not used this new tool. The new technology aims to provide Namibians with services that would enable them to be in constant communication with the rest of the world at any given time. Source: http://allafrica.com

Students to work on e-Governance projects! With an authorisation of the Empowered Committee on e-Governance, the ministry of Company Affairs is going to engage students of professional institutions in its e-Governance projects. These students would help in the scanning and authentication of digitised documents. To overcome the shortage of manpower, it was decided to engage students of professional institutions for a limited period for file preparation and retrieval of files from record rooms. Source: http://www.newkerala.com

phones, promises to make Hindi learning more high-tech and easy. The LILA series, already available on the web for learning Hindi via media of English, Tamil, Kannada and Telugu will now be made available in Bengali. Source: http://infotech.indiatimes.com

Telecommunication In Tanzania, a telephone line first time since invention Some parts of Kiteto and Kondoa Districts in Manyara and Dodoma Regions, in Tanzania, for the first time since the invention of the telephone, will have a telecommunication link to the rest of the country. The people from those areas have had no such infrastructure since Tanzania attained her independence in 1961, and essentially since the invention of telecommunication. Residents of the two districts have been traveling, sometimes up to 65 kilometres, so as to get phone services. Now more than sixty customers of Matui, Mrijo and Soya in Kiteto District were enjoying the services of the Tanzania Telecommunication Company Limited (TTLC) Network. Source: http://www.arushatimes.co.tz

India govt launches MANTRA, the Hindi software The government of India has launched MANTRA (Machine assisted Translation Tool), a software to help translate government documents from English to Hindi, and LILA (Learn Indian Languages through Artificial Intelligence), a Hindi learning software on mobile phones and the internet. The cheap version of the Hindi translating software now available in the form of multi-media card on cellular October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

The cheapest mobile phone now in India Indian engineers at the Bangalore development centre of German semiconductor leader Infineon have helped create the world's first mobile phone, that is cheapest phone of its type, costing around US$20 (Rs. 900-1,000) and works from a pair of off-the-shelf `AAA' size batteries. Infineon engineers had also tested versions, where, by doubling the memory

chips on board, one could add colour to the screen as well as multiple Indian language capability. Source: http://www.hindu.com

India most upwardly mobile in Asia-Pacific With a 69% year-on-year growth to 48 million subscribers from 28 million in 2003, India has become the fastest growing mobile market in the Asia Pacific region. Revenues from the sector are estimated to touch US$24 billion by 2009. In India, mobile penetration which is currently around 4.5% will increase to 30% by 2009. By 2009, worldwide sales of mobile phones is estimated to exceed one billion and about 25% of that growth is expected to come from the Asia-Pacific region. Source: http://www.financialexpress.com

VOIP phones- connecting villagers in Uganda to world Solar and pedal-powered voice-overinternet-protocol (VOIP) phones and Wi-Fi are now used in a few villages in western Uganda where nothing resembling a telephone system has ever been existing. The idea is to bring local, national and international dialing to remote areas of the world. Inveneo, the organisation behind the technology has already installed its Linuxbased voice-over internet-protocol stations at four isolated villages in Bukuuku subcounty, serving a total of nearly 3,200 villagers. Calls between the villages are routed by the hub, and cost nothing -- like dialing another room from a hotel PBX, where as calls destined for outside the village network go over a satellite link between the hub and the main Ugandan telephone exchange. Source: http://www.wired.com

The i4d News

Satellite phones to link 14,000 Indian v villages illages Over 14,000 inaccessible villages in remote India will be linked by the end of 2007 through satellite-phones. The selected villages, which have more than 100 people, are still inaccessible. In the North-East 1,867 such villages have been identified. In Orissa about 4,899 villages have been selected for the plan. About 1,700 remote villages will be connected in Jharkhand, while about 3,500 sat-phones will be installed in rural areas of Uttaranchal. Source: http://www.indianexpress.com

e-Commerce e-Ticket boosting up e-Commerce The on line hotel reservations (e-Ticketing) added with the fast growing low-cost air line business (e-Travel) has resulted in to a doubled e-Commerce generation in India. e-Travel business is expected to jump over 90% to Rs 1,800 crore by the next financial year, from Rs 976 crore in 200405 wjere as e-Ticket is estimated to double to Rs 1,600 crore next year from Rs 800 crore last year. Source: http://www.financialexpress.com

Coal trading gets new facet with portal and e-Auction Gujarat NRE Coke in India has entered into Internet-based coal trading by launching a portal coalrx.com. The company plans to auction one million tonnes of coal through this portal during the current financial year. The new portal will enable the company to sell coal produced in its Australian mines to small and medium sized non-core sector consumers in India. The company is also in talks with Coal India Ltd (CIL) for eAuction of coal produced by CIL subsidiaries to non-core sector consumers. Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com

Rs 50. Once the product is bought, the retailer sends an SMS to the customer from a special mobile phone mentioning the amount. The customer then enters his PIN number and sends back an SMS to the retailer acknowledging the amount to be paid. Airtel customers subscribing to this service will be issued a new SIM card free of cost while ICICI Bank cardholders will be issued an add-on card on the basis of their existing ICICI Bank-Visa credit card. Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com

Wireless Undersea cable link between India and Sri Lanka soon In order to extend the submarine cable connectivity from Sri Lanka to Singapore for providing connectivity to the South-East Asian region in the long run a submarine telecom cable link between India and Sri Lanka is to be laid at an estimated capital cost of Rs 80 crore. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and the Sri Lanka telecom authorities are going to bear the cost. Tuticorin in the Indian state Tamil Nadu would be the submarine cable landing station in India. BSNL would focus on cellular and WLL (wireless in local loop) services, Internet and broadband, IPbased new generation networks, network management, IT billing and customer services. Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com

Now credit card on mobile phones Bharti Tele-Ventures has announced a tieup with ICICI Bank and Visa to launch mChq in India, the credit card facility on the mobile phone. The new service will allow Airtel subscribers to purchase goods for as low as

Livelihood BPOs go rural with GramIT of Satyam IT major Satyam Computer Services Ltd is using the model of outsourcing as a tool to

create employment in rural areas and to check migration to urban centres and thus Business process outsourcing (BPO) is going rural in Andhra Pradesh now. Satyamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s corporate social responsibility (CSR) outfit Byrraju Foundation has set up GramIT, the objective of which is to create enough wealth in villages and livelihood for educated unemployed youth in villages. The 50-seater GramIT centres proposed in each of the identified villages covering four districts will operate in two shifts. The services of these BPOs are targeted only at domestic companies. Source: http://www.financialexpress.com

General PCs at Rs 10,000 by IBM In a move to achieve Union communication and information technology minister, T D Maran's national target of making Personal Computers (PCs) affordable, IBM Global Services India Pvt Ltd is working to introduce computers in the sub-Rs 10,000 category. In contrast to the developed countries, the prevailing price of PCs in India was much higher than the disposable income of an individual which made it unaffordable. India was trailing behind 45 countries and such steps by IBM can lead the country towards better e-Readyness. Source: http://in.rediff.com

Tribal school in India need IT volunteers Information Technology Institute for Tribals of India (ITITI), a Dehradun based privately run residential school for tribal children in India providing IT education to tribal students requires volunteers to tarin its students on technology. The students coming from 8 states in India are studying in classes from VI to X in the school. The young volunteers required for a period of 6 to 12 months need to add more creativity to the existing knowledge of the students on technology. Source: http://groups.yahoo.com

For daily news on ICT4D log on to www.i4d.csdms.in i4d | October 2005

T HE M OUNTAIN F ORUM E XPERIENCE

Partnerships for development Through the structure and functioning of Mountain Forum that its real commitment to develop a truly inclusive and innovative partnership comes to the fore.

Prashant Sharma Mountain Forum Secretariat, ICIMOD Nepal prashant@mtnforum.org

October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

One definition of the word ‘partnership’ is ‘a relationship between individuals or groups that is characterised by mutual cooperation and responsibility, as for the achievement of a specified goal’. It is this definition of ‘partnership’ that drives the Mountain Forum community. The aim of MDG 8 (develop a global partnership for development) has a clear focus on trade, aid and debt which has been reinterpreted by the Mountain Forum for itself. Mountain Forum’s focus is on the idea of facilitating a ‘global partnership for sustainable mountain development’. Certain simple things are required to forge successful partnerships. These are: • a common goal; • an equal sense of ownership amongst all partners; • a supportive environment, either virtual or physical; • consistent and open interaction; • efficient and simple tools to facilitate this interaction; • neutrality on the part of the facilitators; • spirit of sharing. When these are in place, partnerships flower. When partnerships flower, people interact with each other more. When people interact with each other more, they understand each other better. When they understand each other better, they trust each other more. When they trust each other more, they work together. When they work together, the world can change. That is the power of partnerships.

Mountain Forum in brief Mountain Forum (MF) is a community of people and organisations which have a deep interest in mountains and issues of sustainable mountain development across the world. Members who form this community are from 137 countries and include activists, administrators, artists, businessmen, community leaders, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, journalists, policy makers, project managers, researchers, students and teachers amongst others. The Mountain Forum community also includes hundreds of organisations including local NGOs, international NGOs, universities and research institutions, government institutions, and intergovernmental organisations. It is a partnership between people and organisations which are bound together by a single idea that of promoting sustainable mountain development across the world. This community is connected in various ways, including e-mail, Internet, publications, and other media tools. It is perhaps through the structure and functioning of Mountain Forum that its real commitment to develop a truly inclusive and innovative partnership comes to the fore. Mountain Forum is a membership driven, decentralised global network of

Credit: Mountain Forum

Table: Details on the platforms and their utility: Platform

Used for

Membership database

Making links with other individuals and organisations which work in your field; finding funding sources; carrying out joint projects; sharing experiences/learnings through an one-on-one communication.

Discussion lists

Sharing information, making announcements; raising and debating issues, forming consensus, formulating collective strategies for action, knowing more about each other and each others’ work just through an e-mail.

Online library

Finding material for research on mountains and sustainable mountain development; showcasing work; soliciting peer reviews; sharing research findings.

e-Conferences

Sharing in-depth information and experiences related to the e-Conference theme, identifying lessons learnt and promising strategies, building relationships, support and capacity for action, catalysing community and grassroots level action, supporting mountain agenda advocacy, etc. All these are done at a fraction of the cost of a face-to-face conference.

Publications

Making links with those members who are out of the connectivity loop; connecting with both grassroots organisations as well as policy makers; bringing voices of distant members to the fore.

Mountain calendar

Knowing what is happening when and where in the world of mountains and mountain development; meeting fellow members and forming alliances; getting information on the event and its outcomes from the organisers.

networks. It is composed of five regional nodes in Africa, AsiaPacific, Europe, and Latin and North America, as well as a global secretariat located in Kathmandu, Nepal. The regional nodes and the Mountain Forum Secretariat are autonomous organisations, each hosted by different partner institutions. The governance of Mountain Forum is the responsibility of its Board of Directors, which has representatives from partnering host institutions and major donors. However, members of Mountain Forum can elect and/or be elected to the Board of Directors through an electronic process. It is through this mechanism that members have a direct say in the governance of the network. Members in this way define what they want from Mountain Forum, a critical prerequisite to a sense of ownership. Currently, there are two elected members on the Board of Directors – from Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions, with elections slated for Africa in the coming year.

Sharing info by MF The Mountain Forum community shares information and experiences within itself as well as with the rest of the world on any issue related to mountains and sustainable mountain development. This sharing and interaction leads to learning from each other and supporting each other’s work. It further creates a strong, diverse and balanced ‘mountain voice’ which is essential for advocacy. Issues that Mountain Forum community feels strongly about vary across regions such as poverty, health, tourism, environment, economic opportunities, trans-boundary projects, mountaineering, etc. However, the larger Mountain Forum community remains tightly knit through its deep interest in mountains and issues affecting

people in mountain areas of the world. The community is built around several platforms for interaction. When an individual or organisation becomes a member, they interact with and contribute to the community through these platforms. The platforms have been used intensively by members since 1996 when Mountain Forum was established. Several partnerships and alliances have been formed since then, both at individual as well as organisational levels through these platforms. Members have often expressed the ways in which these platforms have helped them forge alliances. To us, these are real partnerships, where MoUs and legal instruments are not the primary focus; but working together, sharing ideas and experiences, and forming bonds are.

Key to achieve MDG 8 Hopefully, MDG 8 will find success in its aims. But political posturing, even if translated into legal instruments, can only provide a temporary reprieve. For a solution that lasts, the spirit itself will have to change – into one of sharing. It is this spirit of sharing that the Mountain Forum community revels in and where it derives its strength from.

Do you have an opinion, suggestion or a story? Write to us at info@i4donline.net

i4d | October 2005

J OURNEY

T ELECENTRES

The telecentre tale Telecentres have been hailed as the solution to development problems in all the countries of the world because of their ability to provide desperately needed access to knowledge and information with the help of ICTs. The telecentres are of various types in terms of functions, infrastructural facilities, ownership and management patterns. In their most basic form, such centres may be no more than public call offices or telekiosks run by local shopkeepers to provide telephone and fax services. In their more advanced form, they aim to be multipurpose development agencies, offering infoexchange, tailored to suit government and community requirements for tele-education, tele-training, tele-medicine, tele-trading and telecommerce. Siddhartha Ghosh G. Narayanamma Institute of Technology & Science Hyderabad mr_siddharth@yahoo.com

Looking back The telecentre movement had its origin in the mid-1980s in Scandinavia. Later it spread to Australia and North America, and since 1990s, it is taking root in the other parts of the globe. In 1983, in the United States, the first ‘community technical centre’ was established in Harlem. In 1980s, the telecentre initiative started spreading in the European countries; the first ‘telecentre’ was opened in the villages of Vemdalen and Harjedalen of North Sweden in 1985, aiming to provide the basic telecommunication services for the local, isolated population. In next ten years, the number of the European telecentres grew to some hundred. At that time, the Anglo-Saxon model, which was different from the Scandinavian model aiming at social development, was taking shape on the European continent. The Anglo-Saxon model of the telecentres can be described as commercial/business telecentres, initiatives that provide long-term access to the ICT devices primarily aiming at profit production. In the nineties and mainly in the developing world, the Scandinavian model came to the forefront again.

Expansion of the networks The Queensland Open Learning Network (QOLN) was established in 1989 by the Queensland State Government to expand the scope and range of educational opportunities through a statewide network of Open Learning Centres. The Western Australia Telecentre Network was established to explore ways for those wishing to pursue post-compulsory studies in remote and rural Western Australia. The Warwickshire Rural Enterprise Network (WREN) in UK was established in 1991 by the National Rural Enterprise Centre (NREC). The Hungarian telecottage movement grew out of a community development programme in 1993 in Csákberény, a October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

small mountain community in mid-western Hungary. These telecottages are now an integral part of the Hungarian government’s approach to achieve local economic regeneration. The Kitimat Community Skills Centre, located about 1,000 kilometres north of Vancouver was incorporated on August 17, 1994 to act as a leading provider of educational technology in the community. Launched in late 1997 as part of a collaborative programme between the Municipality of Asunción and the USAID, the AMIC@ initiative was implemented through the LearnLink project of the Academy for Educational Development in Washington, DC. The Remote Community Services Telecentre (RCST) project was originally envisaged as an initiative to develop and test the concept of a wireless multifunction telecentre for rural and remote communities in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada’s easternmost province. The Nakaseke Multipurpose Community Telecentre is part of the MCT Pilot Programme launched at the coordination meeting for the African Information Society Initiative (AISI) in Addis Ababa in 1996. The telecentres in Mozambique in Namaacha and Manhiça districts provide users with access to computers for word processing, games, CDROM usage, e-mail and Internet. Gaseleka was the very first telecentre to be established by the South African Universal Service Agency (USA) in 1998 to provide the access to ICT services denied to the people by the brutal years of apartheid. Apart from the above initiatives, mention must be made for the Distance Learning Support Centre, started as part of TELISA (Technology Enhanced Learning Initiative of Southern Africa), telecentres in Ghana, the Acacia Programme on Communities and the Information Society in Africa, Jhabua Development Communication Project and the IGNOU Telelearning Centres and virtual campus initiative in India.

Looking towards future Telecentres in developing countries are almost exclusively funded by international aid agencies and are owned and/or managed by national or local NGOs. Such centres, although struggling with issues of self-sustainability, are pioneering in this field and will continue to play an important role in testing new services and applications, creating awareness, and incubating ideas and opportunities for rural communities. There is great scope for exploring new models of telecentre ownership and financing, and interest is growing among private-sector telecom and IT players. Only economically successful models are likely to replicate themselves in larger numbers. New approaches, involving the private sector are required. But the way to attract the commercial telecom and ICT players into serving the technology-based needs of rural communities and developing countries is not so simple.

D EVELOPMENT G ATEWAY A WARD 2005

Award for e-Choupal The Development Gateway Award recognises the most exemplary contribution in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for development during the last ten years. This award helps in understanding the ICT’s role in development and recognise leaders in the field. The award’s focus is on ICT’s impact on social and economic development. The degree of the success, scale and replicability, sustainability, transparency, and the importance of the contribution to a development priority, such as poverty reduction are considered for the selection of the winner. e-Choupal, a programme of ITC Ltd. of India, has been chosen as the winner of the Development Gateway Award 2005 from a group of 135 nominees The $100,000 award recognises

“Benefitting the farmers, farmer’s own”

S Siva Kumar Chief Executive-Agri Businesses ITC Limited sivakumar.s@itc.co.in

What was the background of developing the ITC e-Choupal concept? e-Choupal was conceived as a more efficient supply chain to source agricultural commodities for our export business. Efficiency was achieved through direct interface with the farmer and by leveraging the capabilities of traditional intermediaries. Soon, we realised that the same infrastructure can connect villages efficiently with rest of the world, into or out of villages. Now e-Choupal is universal platform for rural India. Was there any model followed to establish this project? No. It is uniquely architected to suit the conditions of rural India. However, for different components of the model, we do benchmark with different global best players. For agri commodity sourcing, we benchmark with Cargill, for distribution with ITC, for retailing with Walmart, for exchange with eBay, for customer intelligence with Capital One and for farmer empowerment with Amul. How did ITC popularise the concept of e-Choupal in a developing country like India? The concept is designed to suit a developing country like India. We neither charge the farmer for information delivered through

e-Choupal’s impact in enabling millions of farmers in India to improve their livelihoods with access to information on growing and marketing their products. The award was presented at the Development Gateway Forum 2005 on September 16 in Beijing to ITC Chairman Y. C. Deveshwar. The award, previously known as the Petersberg Prize, was presented by Frannie Laautier, vicepresident of the World Bank Institute in the presence of Austin Hu, Deputy Chief of Mission in Beijing for the World Bank, and Alan J. Rossi, CEO, Development Gateway Foundation. Last year, Grameen Bank-Village Phone won the award for helping women entrepreneurs start small businesses providing wireless phone service in rural areas of Bangladesh.

the platform, nor do we compel them to transact with us after he accesses such information. We gain by capturing the latent value in the broken value chains of a developing economy. So it is bound to be popular naturally. What are the major socio-economic changes brought by e-Choupal in the area concerned? The changes are more economic at this time. When the farmers sell to ITC, their transaction costs are much lower than the mandi system. Farmers have more choices to sell their produce, and they can exercise the same empowered by the information available on the e-Choupal portal. This helped improve their bargaining power even when they sell to other channels. The best farming practices knowledge disseminated through e-Choupal, together with access to scientists’ panel set up by ITC, the crop yields are increasing too. On the whole, farmers estimate their incremental incomes due to e-Choupal anywhere between 20 and 50%. e-Choupal has brought about several social changes too. Since we insisted on one kiosk only in a village whereas the farmers prefer at least two, each managed by a Sanchalak from different caste/ religion. So, within a season the villages have overcome caste/religion barriers to access economic benefits. Children of Sanchalaks learn computers rapidly, bridging the digital divide. The education initiave through e-Choupal will extend to other children too. Most important social change that e-Choupal brought about, I believe, is the dignity of choice to the rural people. Has any initiative been taken yet by ITC to replicate e-Choupal in any other developing country? No, at this time we are focusing on rolling out the initiative across India. There is a long way to go before we cover India itself. Indeed, several governments as well as multilateral agencies such as World Bank, International Finance Corporation (IFC), CARE, ADB etc. have been keen on supporting replication of e-Choupal in other

i4d | October 2005

ITC e-Choupal today reaches out to and empowers over 3.5 million farmers over 31,000 villages by enabling them to readily access crop-specific, customised and comprehensive information in their own language. Vernacular websites relating to each agricultural crop that ITC deals in, created by the company, provide real-time information to even the smallest marginal farmers on the prevailing Indian and international prices and price trends for their crop, expert knowledge on best farming practices, and micro-level weather forecast. ITC e-Choupal has already received several national and international awards as a unique transformation model for rural India. ITC’s initiative has earlier won the inaugural ‘World Business Award’ instituted in support of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. ITC e-Choupal also won the Wharton-Infosys ‘Enterprise Business Transformation Award 2004’ for the Asia-Pacific region. The curriculum of the Harvard Business School now includes a case study on the ITC e-Choupal movement and how it is enabling a paradigm shift in Indian agriculture. The ITC e-Choupal strategy also forms part of management guru C.K.Prahlad’s latest book, ‘The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid’.

ITC e-Choupal has also recently commenced a pilot project for providing rural health services through its network of Internet kiosks in partnership with one of the leading private health service providers. There is also a plan to launch educational services through the network in the coming months and the award money of $100,000 will supplement the programme. Receiving the award, Chairman Y. C. Deveshwar said, “By delivering essential healthcare and educational information, we can extend the benefits of e-Choupal more deeply into the fabric of communities across India”. Over the next decade, the ITC e-Choupal network aims to cover over 100,000 Indian villages, representing 1/6th of rural India, and create more than 10 million e-Farmers. Thanking Development Gateway for the award, Deveshwar said, “By recognising programmes like ours, the Development Gateway Foundation is spurring on the use of information technologies in communities worldwide, to build grassroots capacities and enhance the quality of life.” For more details, visit: www.developmentgateway.org/award www.echoupal.com

developing countries in South and South East Asia and Africa. Because of our focus on India, we had to regret. But we did offer to assist any such initiative elsewhere through knowledge sharing, if some organisation comes forward to anchor. What are the key success factors of e-Choupal? ITC’s corporate philosophy to create shareholder value through serving society helps make a strategic choice like e-Choupal which have prolonged period of investment with an equally long gestation. ITC’s deep insights into agricultural value chains and socio-cultural dynamics of rural India helped design this innovative business model. Then, the ITC businesses such as foods and agri exports offered anchor support through large volume off-take of farm produce from e-Choupals. What constraints and challenges have been faced by the e-Choupal project? Weak infrastructure in rural India has been our biggest challenge. We had to make large investments to overcome the shortage of power and telecom bandwidth. Every state we were moving into had to first reform the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee Act (APMC Act) before we could transact the first grain. Can public-private partnership play major role in successful implementation of such kind of project? Certainly. In e-Choupal itself, partnerships with the Public Research System to access the agricultural knowledge generated by them and with the Public Weather Monitoring System to access the weather information have played a major role. Which organisational supports have played major role in e-Choupal to achieve high success? In addition to the partnerships, support of both central government and all the State governments, where we are operating, has been critical. Particularly the Ministries of Agriculture are supporting by

October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

piloting the APMC reform process. As e-Choupal model itself is collaborative by design, support of all partner companies contributed substantially to the success of e-Choupal. Can you share with us any unique experience associated with this project? Right in the beginning, when we had kept two days aside to train the first lot of Sanchalaks in Internet usage, they learnt all of that in two hours and said “What next?” Last month, our Sanchalaks successfully conducted annual ‘Sammelans’ (meetings) at more than a hundred locations with a level of ownership that demonstrated that e-Choupal is truly a ‘Kisanonka hithme, Kisanonka Apna’ (Benefitting the farmers, farmer’s own) organisation. How do you feel after winning the Development Gateway award? Many people have a biased opinion that only Governments, NGOs and multilateral aid agencies are the custodians of public good in this world, and that the motives of private sector is to be always viewed with suspicion. Development Gateway Award to ITC e-Choupal is a wider public recognition of our conviction that private sector too can play a critical role in achieving Millennium Development Goals and making this world a better place for all.

T HE M ISSION 2007

Knowledge revolution in India Moving towards knowledge The beneficial impact of ICT on the rural economy and quality of life is now widely recognised. Mission 2007 was born out of the dream of an independent rural India where Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) bring knowledge, livelihood and prosperity. The first step towards bringing a knowledge revolution in India’s 600,000 villages was initiated by the launch of the National Virtual Academy for Food Security and Rural Prosperity (NVA) on 23 August 2003 to bring scientific knowledge to the villages through ICT tools. The idea was to make the stakeholders participate in the knowledge generation and preservation process. A policymakers’ workshop at M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) on 8-9 October 2003 thought up the ‘Every Village a Knowledge Centre’ plan and recommended an alliance of the private sector, cooperatives, NGOs, R&D institutions, government agencies and the mass media. On 21 February 2004, the steering committee meeting of NVA recommended the set up in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi Open University, the 11 state open universities, National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), IITs and the private sector. The Mission was set into motion at a consultation meeting of the MSSRF, Chennai, on 19-20 May 2004, where a National Alliance was formed for achieving the rural knowledge revolution. The National Alliance for Mission 2007 is a multi-stake holder partnership, consisting of over 157 members across the country. telecentre.org, of IDRC, has provided support for capacity building efforts of Mission 2007. It has generated public, political and

professional commitment essential for success from various quarters. May 19, 2004 was chosen because it marks the death centenary of Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, one of the pillars of India’s industrial growth. The high level policy consultation, organised by MSSRF and One World South Asia with support from IDRC, CIDA, NASSCOM Foundation and SDC in July 2004 in Delhi was covered by i4d. The National Alliance is led by an Executive Board and supported by a secretariat and state-level committees. The Executive Council, consisting of a Chairperson, Secretary-General and three Secretaries, will manage the day-to-day affairs of the Alliance. The General Body and the Steering Committee that will meet at regular intervals will guide it. The General Body consists of the member organisations and provides policy overview and also reviews the work of the Alliance. It also provides policy guidelines to the Governing Council. The Steering Committee consists of more than 20 members to implement the policy set up by the General Body of Mission 2007. The Governing Council consist of an Operations Manager and an Administrative Assistant to execute the work programme under Mission 2007. The National Alliance will work to achieve Mission 2007 through: • Connectivity, • Content generation, dissemination and application development, • Spatial applications for rural prosperity, • Policy issues on content, connectivity and costs, • Resource mobilisation, • Training and capacity building of village entrepreneurs, • Organisation, evaluation and monitoring.

‘United we stand’

Credit: http://www.mission2007.org/

Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, Chairperson of the National Alliance of Mission 2007 has described the power of partnership. According to him, individual strengths of the members may vary, but the collective strength is formidable, and this is the motivation for the National Alliance for Mission 2007. Geeta Sharma, the Operation Manager of Mission 2007 has stated in her article published in i4d, September 2004 issue that a knowledge centre can be put together on a sustainable platform through partnerships, bringing together the private sector and the government for infrastructure development, civil society organisations for community participation and capacity building, academia for innovation and research and the private sector for leading on the financing and scalability. Seven Task Forces were set up to go in depth into the various i4d | October 2005

Fifth Conference of Asian Federation for Information Technology in Agriculture (AFITA 2006)

Credit: http://www.mission2007.org/

components of rural knowledge centres. The term ‘knowledge centre’ was chosen because at the village level there is need for value addition to generic information by converting it into locale-specific knowledge. With training and technical help, local women and men are able to add value to information and mobilise both dynamic and generic information on a demand-driven principle. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of the Government of India, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and several state governments have already developed strategies for accelerating the growth of the Internet and broadband connectivity in rural India. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has laid fibre cables capable of reaching nearly 70 per cent of our villages. The National Informatics Centre (NIC), the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and the State Open Universities have considerable reach in the country.

Making knowledge a common resource The replicability and sustainability of the Village Knowledge Centre movement depend upon its success in achieving a sense of local ownership and management. This will ensure that the Centre provides information and services really needed by the community. As part of NASSCOM Foundation (NF) coastal knowledge network, on May 6, 2005, NF and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have launched the Mission 2007 Knowledge Centre programme in Bhubaneshwar in Orissa. The Orissa initiative is one of the first public-private partnerships that are beginning to be formed across the country as part of the National Alliance mandate to achieve the Mission 2007 goal. In the second convention of Mission 2007, The President of India has reaffirmed that Village Knowledge Centres (VKCs) will form an essential and integral part of the rural infrastructure to ensure a strong developed nation, by the year 2020. With the potential to be support centre for rural entrepreneurship, a trading outlet and social empowerment outfit, a support centre for providing health, education and livelihoods information services in near future, VKCs may show a new light to reach the target or beyond in near future. Source: http://www.mission2007.org/ Saswati Paik, saswati@csdms.in October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

The fifth conference of the Asian Federation of Information Technology in Agriculture (AFITA 2006) organised by Indian Society of Agricultural Information Technology (INSAIT) is to be held from November 9-11, 2006, at the National Science Seminar Complex, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. AFITA was formed on January 24, 1998 in Wakayama city, Japan. It is an autonomous, non-political, non-governmental, non-profit making association. There are also individual associate members from Bangladesh, Mongolia, Pakistan, Lao PDR, and Bhutan Agriculture continues to be the major occupation of Asian communities. In recent years, IT sector is growing exponentially and offers an immense potential for its synergistic effect on the growth of all sectors including agriculture. Rapidly expanding population and dwindling natural resource base in Asia and steady trade liberalisation necessitate harmonious integration of IT and agriculture. The challenge ahead is to explore the opportunities provided by the IT revolution to ensure a vibrant, responsive, sustainable and productive agriculture. The main theme of the AFITA 2006 conference is ‘Agricultural Information Technology for Rural Development’. The conference will provide a platform to dwell on all the issues of vital importance for achieving rural prosperity in all the Asian countries. The topics of the conference are: • WTO, rural economies and ICT policies for rural development • Education, extension and library services • RS and GIS applications for agriculture and precision farming • Decision support systems for biotic and abiotic stresses • Agricultural resources data banks and data mining • e-agribusiness, traceability and virtual agri-markets • Weather prediction models for profitable agricultural production • Use of ICT in natural resources management • Sensors, grid, web and communication systems Papers reflecting the conference theme are invited. Abstract of paper not exceeding 300 words in MS word 2000 version should be submitted within January 16, 2006. All abstracts should be written in English. Electronic version of the abstract should be sent by e-mail as an attachment along with filled in pre registration form. The registration for the event starts from July 15, 2006 and the deadline is September 15, 2006. Contact Address Dr. V.C.Patil Organising Secretary, AFITA 2006 President, INSAIT and Professor and Head, Department of Agronomy, University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad-580 005, Karnataka, India Tel: 0091-836-2440366 Fax: 0091-836-2440366 Email: afita2006@yahoo.com Website: http://www.insait.org

Books received Human Development Report 2005 International cooperation at a crossroads: Aid, trade and security in an unequal world Authors: Kevin Watkins Publisher: Oxford University Press Pages: 372

Price: Rs. 575

As policy advocacy documents, the Human Development Reports have introduced the Human Development concept into national policy dialogue, since the first such Report was launched in 1992 with the support and guidance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Human Development Report takes stock of human development, including progress towards, MDGs. Looking beyond statistics, it highlights the human costs of missed targets and broken promises. Focusing through five chapters on aid, trade and security, the three of the central pillars of international cooperation, Human Development Report 2005 sets out a bold analysis of the problems and identifies solutions. Besides, the Human Development Report data, such as statistics disaggregated by geographic location, ethnic group and rural and urban areas, are going to help pinpoint development gaps, measure progress and flag early warning signs of possible conflict. The Report more often compared to an independent and articulate voice, sponsored by UNDP, like all other previous reports, is certainly going to play the catalytic role in helping frame and forge concrete responses to the key development policy debates of our time- the challenge of meeting the MDGs by the target date of 2015.

Open Sesame Looking for the Right to Information in the Commonwealth Edited by Maja Daruwala Publisher: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative Pages: 100

ISBN: 01-88205-03-6 In the backdrop of promoting and protecting the right to information, Open Sesame looks like a true repository of good practices and a legal resource. The book urges the institutions of the official Commonwealth to adopt and implement the liberal access to liberal laws

developed by people and government while putting in place progressive disclosure and information sharing policies. Open Sesame, being a Report of the International Advisory Commission of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, advocates access to information and access to justice, with an intention of informing community level groups about the value of such accessibility and advocating with policy makers to ensure laws that reflect the real information needs. The Report is broadly categorised under four chapters, the last of which shares a number of cases studies of civil society advocacy experiences. The Report endeavours to provide a document that not only demonstrates the value to democracy and development but also searches a practical solution to the systemic governance problems that beset most commonwealth countries today.

Digital Divide Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet Worldwide Authors: Pippa Norris Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pages: 320

Price: $ 22

ISBN: 0-521-00223-0 With an extensive amount of up-to-date international data, the book Digital Divide sets out to examine the evidence for access and use of the Internet in 179 nations across the world. Within the online community, evidence for a democratic divide is emerging between those who do and those who donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use the Internet resources to engage, mobilize and participate in public life. The contents of the book proceed in three parts. Part I of the book sets out the theoretical framework which suggests that use of the new technology can be understood as the product of resources, motivation and the structure of opportunities. The part II compares the structure of opportunities for political use of the Internet, in terms of the news environment, political parties and campaigns, civic society and the government. And part III examines the impact of attention to the Internet for news and political engagement, considers the major explanations of net civic engagement, and evaluates the main policy options for reducing the digital divide. The conclusion drawing together the major findings and considering their implications for democracy is certain to prove the book a path-breaking study in comparative political communication. i4d | October 2005

October 2005

ICTD Project Newsletter

Mahiti Mitra Centre at Dudhai, India

Kutch Nav Nirman Abhiyan Improving Self Governance through ICTs in Kutch district of Gujarat. “Mahiti Mitra” – Setus or information kiosks Kutch Nav Nirman Abhiyan (KNNA) is a network of 28 rural development voluntary organizations in the district of Kutch in Gujarat state in the western desert region of India. Having emerged from a natural calamity - the cyclone of 1998 – Abhiyan, as it is commonly known, (translates literally as Campaign) has been in the forefront of disaster management and coordination during the cyclones of 1998, 1999, drought of 2000, and the massive earthquake of 2001. This network has come together and an ambitious project has been drawn up to use information and communications technologies for development, and especially for improving local self governance. The project envisages the creation of the Setu ICT kiosks by the Setu centres in their clusters, and developing the

kiosk as a platform which enables the Gram Panchayat (local governance bodies at village level) bodies and Gram Sabhas to access the various ICT technology applications as also simple information tools and services from the kiosks in order to improve both their ability to self-govern and generate better development opportunities. Creating a close communication linkage between the Gram Panchayats and the district administration/Jilla Panchayat is also envisaged in the programme. (Setu refers to bridge, Gram Panchayats and Jilla Panchayats refer to local governance system at the village and district levels, and Gram Sabha refers to the gathering of the local governance bodies). The scope of the coverage of this project in the western desert district of

Kutch is 613 Panchayats covering 951 villages, of which 882 are inhabited villages. The campaign operates with a steering committee and governing body which guide the coordinating umbrella and the network. The coordinating umbrella reaches 360 villages and is engaged in activities like running a craft resource centre, the K link project, the Setu Centre projects for self-governance (information kiosks) and innovative building technologies and innovations programme. The network is engaged in advocacy, information dissemination, disaster response, relief, rehabilitation, training, drought proofing, etc, covering 450 villages, The Project envisages Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) as one critical element in an overall effort to build capacities of the Gram Panchayats for self-governance. Apart from the ICT intervention, the Setu centres are also involved in other kinds of training interventions. The vision to develop a sustaining, reliable, effective, and replicable model for e-selfgovernance in Kutch district is the driving force behind the project.

Project objectives 1. Deploy ICT as a tool for enhancing the efficiency and transparency of local self-governance 2. Use ICT to develop within PRIs an enhanced understanding and appreciation of their rights and responsibilities and enable informed decision-making in local selfgovernance and development 3. Provide digital networking of the remote areas to facilitate liasioning and two-way communication between PRI/Gramsabha and Jilla Panchayat (JP)/ external agencies/ NGOs

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Stall at a village fair to create awareness

4. Develop capabilities of PRI and local communities for making effective use of ICT for their development planning including micro-level natural resource management 5. Build capacities of local communities to become meaningful partners in self e-governance initiatives

Raj), and empower the PRIs for selfgovernance IV Building Public Private Partnerships for sustainability IV.I ICT not as a technological end in itself but as an enabling intervention amongst many other interventions for building capacities of PRIs

The geographical scope

Expected outcomes

Setu Programme currently covers 320 revenue villages and 60 hamlets in the Kutch District of Gujarat State. This project proposes to cover all the 380 villages currently under the Setus centres reaching 62,489 households.

1. Setting up of 18 Setu kiosks across 380 village clusters 2. Setting up a single window coordination centre for all Gram Panchayats with the Jilla Panchayat / District Development Officer (DDO).

The implementation approach and strategy The network of organizations forming the Abhiyan follows the following principles in developing its approach and strategy: I Developing a Cluster approach for capacity building of Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) and selfgovernance II Building Capacities of the PRIs in both its Governance and Development functions. III Ensure the use of ICT not only for improving the governance of the State, but primarily for the smooth implementation of PR (Panchayati

Training of the vocational groups

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3. Develop the K-Link hub with capacities to train, monitor, technically and technologically augment, troubleshoot, and set up information management systems at the kiosk 4. At least 25% of the district’s Gram Panchayat members will be accessing the Setu kiosks for various services, and information. 5. At least 25% of the District’s Panchayats will be communicating with the DDO and Jilla Panchayat directly, and regularly, at least on a monthly basis, through the kiosks. Video-conferencing between Gram Panchayats (GP) and Jilla Panchayat (JP) would become feasible, functional, and regular in all the centers by the end of three years. 6. The project would have supported all the 18 clusters and their PRIs in undertaking resource mapping of their villages, and their clusters. And at least 30% of the PRIs would have translated their plans into developmental action in their villages through various schemes. 7. ICT application would be used by the GP and Gram Sabhas specifically to improve the livelihood status of the fishing community, salt pan workers, dry-land farmers, artisans (potters, weavers, block-printers), and ‘maldharis’-cattle herders in their villages.

8. All gram panchayats would have been information enabled to support widows in vulnerable conditions, the disabled, landless, and the very old with specific schemes and developmental programmes. The Project would have led at least 25 Group Gram Panchayats to set up their own village ICT initiative, computerize their administrative, and finance systems, computerize citizen services, and access information locally. The reason for the conservative estimate of the number of village level ‘kiosk’ is because gram panchayats, due to the low devolution in the Panchayat Act are yet a long way from functioning as a legitimate Gram Panchayat. Secondly, there is a very low literacy/education level in the area that the Setus will be concentrating in. Thus, literacy and computer literacy become additional capacity building inputs that the Setu centres will impart independently. 9. All Gram panchayats in the proposed clusters can access their records/ forms applications through the kiosks in terms of hard copies, and will also be able to re-send where necessary.

Project progress Two Setu Centres or Mahiti Mitras have been established in September/October 2004 in Adesar and Shamakhiyali villages, and have already started generating revenue. Infrastructure and hardware have been acquired for 7 new centres, and training activities have begun for these kiosk operators, elected representatives, etc. These cover the following areas: • Training Rural Youth, as Para Cadre in Health, Education • Disaster Preparedness • Livelihood Groups • Governance services at the Panchayat level, and support for these institutions • Right to Information

The Stakeholders: The Setu Mahiti-Mitra (kiosk) is being set up near bus stands/ tea shops which are centrally accessed by a cluster of villages. These spaces are being taken

inputs market, weather information, formulation of various developmental proposals, etc. The services that create an enabling environment include providing key skill and capacity building

Exhibition and presentation at village fair

on rent. The thrust is building brand identity for these centres. The key stakeholders which are elected represented local governance bodies, specific livelihoods groups, farmers, artisans, fishing community, cattle breeders, salt pan workers etc., women and other collectives, students and children, local government functionaries, and NGOs in the cluster.

The services The Mahiti Mitra services are focused on three key areas. The first set of services focuses on Governance. The second set of services has a thrust on Development. The third, but equally important set of services relates to creating an enabling environment at the village level. Few examples of Governance services includes computerization of accounts for the Panchayati Raj Institutions, application forms, certificates, land records, reporting, drafting and monitoring services data. Development focused services includes, among others, use of planning tools like (GIS, satellite imagery, etc.), information on output and

services and entertainment. This include a number of activities like computer classes, adult education classes, eNewspapers, video games, music and cultural programmes, screening films, documentaries, scanning, photo facilities, etc. In all there are 32 different services that have been provided at these centres.

The current scenario All the network clients are connected through the remote access server to the central network of K-link. Three servers are providing key services, viz., mail & proxy server, application & web server, and a database server The clients connect through a wirelessloop or PSTN lines to the main network, Wi-fi and WLL connectivity provides scope for district wide coverage. At the district panchayat level one staff has been dedicated to enable the e-government system, and to provide feedback on queries generated. This staff is also responsible for making government schemes and programmes converted to an easy access format to the elected local representatives of the Gram Sabha, and to coordinate with

37 www.nisg.org

o o

Inadequate e-Governance Market rate updates are not available

Some Key Requirements of Users of the Setus • Need to update ration cards • Corruption related grievance communications • Information regarding laws, procedures and legal mechanisms • Revenue and land related information • Government schemes and forms • Panchayat’s queries regarding industrialization opportunities • Students and disabled accessing entitlements • Demand for computer education The kind of responsiveness and demand as mentioned above makes the project progress look very positive in

Current Setu network scenario

various government departments. The kiosk operators have been trained, and ICT penetration in rural areas has been achieved. What is encouraging is the capacity building activities that have already been undertaken have created new levels of empowerment to the local people. New partnerships with external agencies have been forged with Centre for Development of Advanced Computing, Bangalore (C-DAC, Bangalore), for the development eForms (developing efficient ways to create forms and collect data); an information portal for buyers and sellers called ‘Vyapar’; and ‘ECHO’ Empowering Communities through Knowledge; and with Indian Space Research Organisation, Bangalore (ISRO, Bangalore).for the setting up of village resource centres to provide services like V-SAT connectivity, telemedicine, tele-education, teleagriculture, e-Services and a weather station. The K-link web portal provides mail services, employment news, help desk, a discussion board, announcement, world fact book and laws. Partial roll outs have also taken place

Mahiti Mitra Centre at Lodhai

in Makhna, Dudhai, Lodai and Khambhara centres from July to September 2005.

Challenges and issues being faced • Network connectivity • Lack of computer literacy and low education status in the community • At the district administration level o Lack of computer literacy o Insufficient computerization

38 www.nisg.org

the Kutch district of Gujarat. ICTs have been used very innovatively and in response to people’s needs, identified through a detailed assessment process that involves the community, the local decision makers and the network of NGOs. NISG and i4d reserve the right to reprint articles produced for the ICTD section of the i4d magazine and website, with due credits to NISG and i4d. Please write to the editor for any request of reprints.

Rendezvous T HE 2005 W ORLD S UMMIT , S EPTEMBER 14 – 16, 2005, N EW Y ORK

Development for development Discussions were held, debates were raised, plans and strategies were made for long period of time before a large event – the 2005 World Summit. The World Summit ‘a once-in-a-generation opportunity’ was held from September 14 - 16 at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The 2005 World Summit aimed to give a major boost to the efforts to reach the development goals, to provide a chance to advance the broader development agenda and the larger challenges of development that confront us, in particular, the core issues like growing inequality, persistent gender inequality, and increasing the participation of developing countries in global economic governance. The 2005 World Summit brought together more than 170 Heads of State and Government, the largest gathering of world leaders in history. The agenda was based on an achievable set of proposals outlined in March by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in his report ‘In Larger Freedom’. Kofi Annan, in his address to the High-Level Segment of the Economic and Social Council, in New York, on June 29 offered some thoughts on the 2005 World Summit and the contribution that ECOSOC (Economic and Social Council) can make to that historic event. He also stated that economic growth is vital, but not sufficient by itself. The General Assembly closed its fifty-ninth session on September 13, approving the draft outcome document, the centrepiece of its 2005 World Summit, to provide global leaders to forge a global consensus on development, security, human rights and United Nation renewal.

Secretary-General with World Summit Co-chairs October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

Secretary General addresses 2005 World Summit

What they have said The 2005 World Summit included plenary meetings continuing over the three days, where Heads of State or Government and other senior officials made statements. The world leaders met on September 14 to assess the progress made since a landmark conference on development financing, held five years ago in Mexico. Swedish Prime Minister Göran Persson, who is also Co-Chair of the General Assembly’s High-Level Plenary, told those gathered that the outcome of the 2005 World Summit should be the end of poverty. He also stated that the world leaders at the World Summit had an opportunity and a responsibility to change the world right now. The Secretary-General, Kofi Annan noted that while dramatic reductions in extreme poverty had been made in the past 25 years, international solidarity still fell well short of need. His speech reflected urges for reform process as he stated ‘We stand or fall together’ in facing crucial challenges. He has strongly encouraged other countries to support the initiative to create a ‘Leaders’ Network in support of UN reform. He welcomed the initiative of the Prime Minister of Sweden, Göran Persson towards this. He has expressed his hope that the Leaders’ Network can help translate the commitments made at the World Summit into effective action. In this context, the sixtieth session of the General Assembly, of which Sweden holds the Presidency, is very important. On September 21, the International Day of Peace, in his message, marking International Day of Peace, Kofi Annan has urged world leaders to set about implementing decisions taken at the World Summit. The world’s leaders in the meeting agreed to take action on a range of global challenges such as development, terrorism, peace

department now employed a client-oriented approach, whereby it and other areas of the Secretariat worked together to develop information packages and campaigns, creating a ‘culture of communication’ throughout the United Nations. In her address to the Occidental College Symposium in New York on October 19, the Deputy Secretary-General Louise Fréchette’s has mentioned that to implement the Summit outcome on security and human rights, a lot has to happen at the UN itself, both in the Group Photo of World Summit 2005

building, peace keeping, peace making, responsibility to protect, human rights, democracy and rule of law, management reform, environment, international health, humanitarian assistance and updating the UN Charter.

Thinking for better way After the Summit, the General Assembly high-level annual debate continued on September 21, where the ministers from around the world stressed that while the overall outcome of the World Summit was disappointing, that did not mean that reform of key UN bodies should not, or could not, continue. In two meetings on that day, Member States were urged to keep up the momentum generated by the Summit, which, despite its limited results, had endorsed Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s call to revitalise the sixty-year-old organisation by upgrading the Security Council, creating a new, more effective human rights body, and green-lighting a new Peacebuilding Commission, that would develop integrated strategies for post-conflict reconstruction. On September 29, the General Assembly has considered UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s report on the work of the organisation, delegations called for harnessing the momentum of the recent World Summit to implement crucial decisions during the current session, including the establishment of a Peace building Commission and a Human Rights Council, as well as move forward on UN reform. On October 6, 2005 Kofi Annan, while delivering speech in the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Executive Committee at the Palais des Nations in Geneva stated that World Summit made remarkable commitment to humanitarian community. Recently, in another address to the New University of Lisbon, he said that World Summit achieved concrete, significant gains in human rights, rule of law. In his video message to the Annual Conference of the United Nations Field Staff Union in Brindisi, Italy, on October 12, he has asked for cooperation in implementing World Summit decisions. During the 7th meeting, as the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonisation) began its examination of questions relating to information, the delegates were informed that the reorientation process, initiated three years ago by Kofi Annan, had fundamentally changed the way the Department of Public Information (DPI) defined and carried out its mission, and the promotion of the 2005 World Summit was the most recent example of how the changes were paying off. In his address to the Committee Under-Secretary-General for Communication and Public Information, Shashi Tharoor said his

World Summit Reception

General Assembly and in the Secretariat. The Member States must finalise the outstanding details on the Peace Building Commission, and agree on important details to establish the Human Rights Council. They must press ahead with efforts to achieve a comprehensive convention on terrorism, and develop a global antiterrorism strategy based on the elements the Secretary-General has suggested and must meet their pledge to double the budget of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and should provide the necessary support to enable the development of a standing policy capacity for UN peacekeeping. The UN on 24th October has celebrated its 60th birthday with wreath layings for fallen colleagues, the ringing of the Harmony Bell and appeals to rise to the new challenges that lie ahead. On this occasion, the Secretary-General Kofi Annan recalled last month’s World Summit where leaders sought to forge a common response to new challenges in a world that is very different from that of the organisation’s founders. It is true, as already stated by Kofi Annan, that with implementation, the Summit may come to be seen as a turning point for the UN. But if implementation lags or fails, those who say the Summit was a major disappointment will be proven right. United Kingdom Prime Minister Tony Blair, also addressed at the Summit capturing the challenge ahead of the nations all over the globe, “No summit requiring unanimity from 191 nations can be more than modest.” The UN continues to streamline and renew its internal structure. UN must adapt itself to meet the needs of today’s geopolitics and global challenges efforts need to be intensified to make it more effective, transparent and accountable. Each individual state must come forward to join hands to make the adventure of UN most successful one. For more information, visit the Summit website at www.un.org/summit2005 and http://www.un.org/ga/documents/overview2005summit.pdf. i4d | October 2005

Rendezvous WSIS P REPCOM 3, 19-30 S EPTEMBER 2005, G ENEVA

The final arguments The third preparatory committee meeting for the second phase of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) took place from 19 to 30 September 2005 at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. This was the last preparatory committee meeting before the WSIS event. Ambassador Janis Karklins of Latvia, President of the WSIS Prepcom, mentioned at the opening session that the Prepcom 3 was the only time allotted for governments to complete work on the documents to be finally agreed to by Heads of State in Tunis in November.

Civil Society support For much of civil society, the Prepcom began with an all-day orientation session on 18 September. The orientation opened with a general overview of the status of negotiations and preparations with Charles Geiger, head of the WSIS executive secretariat. Following this was a quick rundown of the various structures and groupings of civil society, including the Civil Society Bureau, the Content and Themes Group, the Working Group on Working Methods, and the various Civil Society caucuses and working groups. This orientation session was notable for a two-hour session outlining the various issues surrounding the area of Internet Governance. Several experts from civil society, including Wolfgang Kleinwachter, Bill Drake, Adam Peake, Jeanette Hoffmann, Milton Mueller, and Avri Doria, gave rapid-fire reports and commentary on the Internet, its governance and the important issues for civil society to consider. While the speakers expressed frustration that there was not enough time to cover all of the subject matter, many participants felt that it was very helpful to get a quick overview of the key issues being discussed in the coming two weeks. Beyond the official negotiations, the 125-some side-events organized by Civil Society brought attention to the various interests of civil society, from gender concerns to youth empowerment, human rights, freedom of expression and the press, education, ethics and values, and peace.

Government support At Prepcom III, government delegations faced a daunting pile of ‘bracketed’ text going into the negotiations (brackets representing text that is still not agreed by all delegations). The official negotiations took place within two sub-committees: Sub-committee A on Internet Governance issues and Subcommittee B, led by the spirited South African Lyndall ShopeMafole, on ‘all other issues’ in the texts. Internet Governance negotiations went at a fairly rapid clip in the first week, with civil society making a number of good October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

interventions and suggested amendments under the active leadership of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus. Meanwhile in Sub-Committee B, the main contentious issues related to what happens after Tunis. That is, once the hoopla has died down, what international mechanisms need to be put in place to ensure that the goals agreed to in Geneva and Tunis don’t remain simply nice but empty aspirations? Among the options on the table, is the creation of some kind of inter-agency coordination body under the auspices of the UN Secretary General. Another possibility is the establishment of a ‘Commission on the Information Society’ similar to other Commissions set up after other UN Summits, such as the Commission on Human Rights and the Commission on Sustainable Development. One innovative idea put forward by the Chilean delegation is to re-tool an existing ECOSOC Commission called the ‘Commission on Science and Technology for Development’ to be the follow-up and implementing body after WSIS. Another contender is the ‘Global Alliance for ICT and Development’ being supported by the UN ICT Task Force.

Follow-up Whatever follow-up and implementation body gets set up, civil society has been most concerned that it have a multi-stakeholder, transparent and participatory nature reflecting how the WSIS and the Working Group on Internet Governance has operated over the past four years. Another issue is how to make sure the summit does have an impact on the real world. The new draft contains less commitment of governments to serious implementation efforts, and it also is a major step back for multi-stakeholderism. The United States government has made clear that it did not want this summit in the first place, and that it wants the WSIS process to stop after Tunis. Others like Brazil are keen on making sure meaningful implementation procedures are set up by the summit - otherwise it would have been a ‘major waste of time and money’. Prepcom III concluded at around 2100 hours on 30 September, with a vague lack of resolution on the main issues and texts. The presumption is that the Prepcom will re-convene for 3 days or so in Tunis just before the Summit. Meanwhile, there will be an ‘open-ended negotiation group’ chaired by the president of the Prepcom mandated to negotiate all remaining issues except Internet Governance. This leaves Internet Governance to be concluded right before the Tunis Summit. Source: http://www.itu.int/wsis/preparatory2/pc3/

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Bytes for All... Community development

Community radio

e-Discussion on Chattisgarh

Vinaya Kasajoo of Nepal wrote about the role Community Radio can play in the Disaster Management. Nepal FM Radio has been used in the management of food and other disaster effected area in some countries. Radio was widely used in Mozambique. FM sets cost less than US$ 3. They can be air dropped. Suitcase FM stations can be installed immediately like the rebels of Nepal are doing in hill areas. This system can help to manage the rehabilitation of the victims and to find the lost members of the family. Danicom or some other radio company can he requested. I think it can be more effective and quick way to manage information in the earthquake area and the rehabilitation of the victims. Vickram Crishna wrote that they can make ‘suitcase’ stations for very local broadcasting (within a radius of 400 m roughly) available for under US$ 120.

Shubhranshu Choudhary (smitashu@gmail.com) informed the readers an e-discussion group called Chhattisgarh-Net (http:// 36garh.notlong.com), which discusses issues related to development of Chhattisgarh state in India and its people. It is trying to put together a People’s Website of Chhattisgarh to go up on 1st Nov when the state turns 5. Any suggstion/help for any study/link/ story related to any People’s issue of Chhattisgarh to be put on the site will be highly appreciated.

Disaster management From Sri Lanka to Pakistan Fouad Riaz Bajwa (bajwa@fossfp.org) informed that the Sri Lankan’s Chamindra de Silva and another volunteer developer are arriving in Islamabad to deploy Sahana that is a Free and Open Source Software disaster management system that handles missing/displaced persons, camp management, assistance, trading system, etc. These are the lead developers for the same system which was used in Sri Lanka to co-ordinate aid for the Tsunami disaster. Pakistan Software Export Board, Open Source Resource Centre, International Open Source Network UNDP-IOSN are assisting them to Pakistan. More information on Sahana: http://sahana.sourceforge.net/ http://news.info-share.net/?p=8

ICT4D Debate at Bytes for All Readers Forum Battleground of ideas: FLOSS debate raises tempers at BytesForAll GOA, India — APC member BytesForAll’s mailing list recently played host to a strong, and at times polemical, debate on proprietaryversus-FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software). In this debate, there were these couple of great posts here and here, that put things neatly in perspective — thanks to David Geilhufe who is co-founder of the SocialSourceFoundation.org and Sunil Abraham of Mahiti.org. This debate threw up a range of issues about the role of FLOSS in the ‘developing’ countries, its role in localisation, how it competes with proprietorial software, why its benefits haven’t yet reached regions like Africa, and how diverse approaches to software could actually make a difference in the real world. BytesForAll is a South Asian voluntary network, founded along the free software principles of volunteering, but focussing on information — and how information and communication technologies could be more relevant to the common(wo)man, specially in South Asia. It all started with a rather critical-of-FLOSS post by University of Manchester’s Dr Richard Heeks offering a link to an

Announcement Road2Tunis Md. Akteruzzaman (akzaman@gmail.com) welcomed the readers to join 3-days Road Show on world best e-Content at Bhashani Navo theatre from 23-25 October which will be inaugurated by Hon. Prime Minister along with an International workshop on “Building an Information Society : Road2Tunis” He also welcomed Bangladeshi e-Content producers (WSA National Nomination will get preference) to showcase their product free of charge at decorated stall in Bangladesh ICT Showcase at the same time. e-Development briefing titled ‘Free and Open Source Software: A Blind Alley for Developing Countries?’. It calls the 1980s shareware ‘FOSS forerunner’ to have had ‘zero’ impact, says data from Africa shows only five percent of computers ‘in developing countries’ have any open source software running on them, and notes that proprietorial software dominates “even in Cuba... where the US embargo should make conditions highly propitious”. Besides, the briefing says that “piracy” and the “limited size of initial purchase price within total cost of software ownership” there is actually no “evidence of FOSS delivering cost savings”. Says the briefing: “In particular, proprietary software may not be open source but it is certainly free for the great majority of developing country users, thanks to piracy.” It points to the lack of awareness of FOSS in Africa, and the lack of international links needed to be part of an “active, global community of like-minded developers”. One early response to this brief text came from BytesForAll cofounder Frederick ‘FN’ Noronha and is here for viewing. Noronha, who goes by the initials of FN, argues, “The “5% of computer systems” overlooks the role played by FLOSS in servers, in keeping the Internet running, in giving unprecedented access to developers of the Third World to take part in a global movement, and more.” This study, argues this post, overlooks the potential of FLOSS in i4d | October 2005

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Bytes for All... large ‘developing’ countries like India, China, Brazil and South Africa. It points to another study — from Finland — which it says is more open to the benefits of FLOSS in the “developing” world. See the report at http://www.maailma.kaapeli.fi/ FLOSSReport1.0.html. FN also adds, “By saying ‘proprietorial software is free’ for the bulk of the ‘developing’ world, the study is guilty of both tolerating/ encouraging the illegally copying of software (‘piracy’ is a loaded term, unfortunately accepted by academia too) and missing the essence of what Free Software is all about (offering the freedom to be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed). We are not fighting just for the right to remain ‘pirates’....” Richard ‘RMS’ Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation joining in the debate with these comments. There was a longish debate on benchmarking FLOSS. Javier Sola, a Spanish-Chilean working on Khmer language localisation in Cambodia, added some interesting points. Javier, who works with APC member the Open Forum of Cambodia, argues: “Academics should make sure that they look at all factors when they write something like this. In this case the author has not come even close to it. He has, among others, completelly ignored the power of localisation, diminished as “techies and amateurs” some of the people that have clearer ideas of what is needed for real migration and used anectdotal data for his conclusions.” Sunil Abraham argues how proprietorial software could kill — no exaggeration, due to its delays and restrictions — in a postTsunami situation. He also argues that “Because Sahana (a Free/ Libre and Open Source Software project to cope with disasters) is FOSS, the earthquake stricken people from Pakistan and India don’t have to spend money earmarked for food on software.” Then, in an almost tongue-in-cheek Sunish manner, he argues that FLOSS “increases the responsiveness of an organisation. This is important whether it is peoples lives or greater profits.” David Geilhufe has this very interesting response to argue that FLOSS offers “viral diffusion” (to enable its uncontrolled spread, of course in a positive way), local control and lower barriers to entry. Well put, and very well argued. Here’s what David argues eloquently: “There is no religious war here, but I think the staunch defenders of proprietary code get stuck on analyzing the software... this isn’t the important part. One needs to analyse the innovation and use of software... that, I believe, is where the real ICT impact lies.” David’s Social Source Foundation is here. It is “A nonproft organisation that exists to create open source, mission-focused technology for the nonprofit and NGO sector.” Another link is the OpenNGO.org network. OpenNGO calls itself “An open source project to create a set of web-based tools designed to meet the needs of small U.S. nonprofit organisations and non-governmental organisations across the globe.” Meanwhile, another strong debate continued at the Global Knowledge for Development mailing-list, visible at the archives October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

here. Some supported Heeks views, while others said academia was missing the point on FLOSS. Said Mark Davies: “As an African business, and as an African software development business, I still don’t get it. There’s so much enthusiasm for FOSS, there’s so much conference mind-share spent on this topic, and yet I don’t see an illuminating discussion about the opportunities for risk/reward for people like us.” After facing a lot of counterpoints, Heeks responded: “You can read this message in two ways: either that FOSS will never deliver; or that the FOSS community needs to rethink its strategies. Or, of course, if you’ve devoted months or years to FOSS and don’t like the message, you’ll try to denigrate the writer, deny the data, and so forth.” Klaus Stoll the president of Fundacion Chasquinet in Quito, Ecuador also swam against the tide. He wrote: “...yes, my organisation Chasquinet Foundation works with Microsoft and yes it is the same organisation that produced and published the open source tollbox for Telecenters in Latin America and yes we have as a policy in our organisation that people should have a right to choose. What counts for us here at the grassroots are real ICT tools for Development, be they open source or otherwise, what counts is if they make a real positive impact in improving peoples lives.” African NGO Kaibassa argued here: “We at Kabissa have a very practical orientation and don’t really push open source in our trainings or through our services and website unless it’s just staring in our faces as just plain better. Open source content management systems and other server-based tools and desktop applications like Firefox and Thunderbird spring straight to mind. In the meantime, I hope you and other software developers in Africa are aware of and considering attending Africa Source II.” But one key perspective came from Richard ‘RMS’ Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation. He commented: “The choice between free (freedom-respecting) and proprietary (usersubjugating) software is not a technical choice. It is an ethical and political issue about people’s freedom. To be neutral on issues that merely concern technology is fine. To be neutral on ethical and political issues about freedom is nothing to be proud of.” Teresa Crawford of aspirationtech.org announced a Nonprofit Software Selection Survey. Aspiration calls this “the first-ever ‘Nonprofit Software Survey’ of those making decisions about software solutions in and for nonprofits and NGOs around the world.” http://foss4us.org/blog

Bytes for All: www.bytesforall.net Bytes For All Readers Discussion: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ bytesforall_readers Bytes for All RSS syndication: http://www.bytesforall.net/index_html/ RSS Bytes for All Readers Forum RSS syndication: http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers/rss Bytes for All discussion summary compiled by: Frederick Noronha, Bytes for All, India

for for for for for for for

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D ISASTER F EATURE

Disaster review In the year 2005, the people of various corners of the globe have experienced numerous natural disasters. The latest one is the earthquake in Pakistan and India. The heaviest damage occurred in the Muzaffarabad area in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, where entire villages were destroyed. At Uri in India, 80 percent of the town was destroyed. Pakistan appears to have born the brunt of this disaster, including an overwhelming majority of the deaths. Nearly forty percent of the affected areas are inaccessible due to landslides. In India, people have died, mainly in the Uri sector of Baramulla. In Afghanistan, there are reports of some injuries and structural damage, mainly in provinces nearest Pakistan. Taken together, hurricanes Katrina and Rita are by far the most costly natural catastrophe in the US history, with estimates of insured losses now exceeding $60 billion. Hurricane Katrina was the eleventh named tropical storm, fourth hurricane, third major hurricane, and first Category 5 hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the third most powerful storm of the season, behind Hurricane Wilma and Hurricane Rita, and the sixth-strongest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina) The South Asia subcontinent has already experienced devastating Tsunami last year. Time will tell us how many worse experiences are waiting for us in this year. Before experiencing those, let us have a glimpse of the past experiences of disasters which have affected maximum people of various nations last year (2004). Top 10 disasters by number of deaths Disasters

Countries affected

Tsunami (December) Hurricane Jeanne (September) Flood (May-June) Tropical storm Winnie (November) Flood (June-August) Flood (May-June) Dengue epidemic (January – April) Earthquake (February) Meningitis epidemic (January – March) Cyclonic Galifo (March)

12 countries were affected Haiti Haiti Philippines India Dominican Republic Indonesia Morocco Burkino Faso Madagascar

Number of deaths 280931 2754 2665 1619 900 688 658 628 527 363

Source: http://www.em-dat.net/documents/figures/death.jpg

Top 10 disasters by number of affected people Disasters

Countries affected

Flood (July) Flood (June-August) Flood (June-August) Typhoon Rananim (August) Flood (September) Drought Drought Cold wave (July) Typhoon Aere (August) Cyclone Galifo (March)

China People’s Republic Bangladesh India China People’s Republic China People’s Republic South Africa Kenya Peru Philippines Madagascar

Number of affected people 33,652,026 36,000,000 33,000,000 8,594,000 8,253,000 4,000,000 2,300,000 2,137,467 1,058,849 988,139

Source: http://www.em-dat.net/documents/figures/affected.jpg

i4d | October 2005

What’s on

New Zealand 28-29 November, 2005 2nd Annual International Conference on Knowledge Management in the Asia Pacific Wellington http://kmap2005.vuw.ac.nz/

Bangladesh

Indonesia

19-20 November, 2005 National Consultation on Designing an Enabling framework for Community Radio Dhaka

24-27 November, 2005 1st AMARC Asia Pacific Regional Conference Bali

http://www.bnnrc.net/crconsultation.htm

http://conference.asiapacific.amarc.org/

4-9 December, 2005 14th International Conference on AIDS/ STIs in Africa (ICASA) Abuja

Canada

Italy

www.icasa2005.org

07-09 November, 2005 HR4ICT, Toronto

15-17 March, 2006 1st World Congress on Communication for Development Rome

http://www.cto.int/hr4ict/index.php

cmorry@comminit.com

Ethiopia 28-30 November, 2005 Civil Society, Governance and Integration in Africa, Addis Ababa abdalla@bujra.com

Fiji Islands

Kenya 23-25 February, 2006 IDLELO2: Achieving Millennium Development Goals through Community Software Nairobi

1-4 December, 2005 5th IIDS International Conference on Governance and Development Suva

http://www.fossfa.net/idlelo2/

www.usp.ac.fj/IIDS

26-28 October, 2005 ICT Conference 2006 Kathmandu

India

Nepal

http://www.itconference.org.np/

5-9 December, 2005 5th International Conference of OURMedia / NUESTROSMedios Bangalore http://www.ourmedianet.org

30 January-02 February, 2006 Connecting Rural Communities Cochin

Netherlands 03 November, 2005 Fill-the –Gap! Public event inspired by WSIS The Hague http://www.iicd.org/articles/iicdnews.2005-0721.1878475672

http://www.cto.int/rural05/index.html

12-15 December, 2005 Second International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society Hyderabad http://technology-conference.com/

14-15 November, 2005 Open Source for Education in Europe 2005 Heerlen http://www.openconference.net/index. php?cf=3

Nigeria

Thailand 15-17 March, 2006 “Strengthening the Business Fabric with Dynamic ICT” IDC’s Asia/Pacific CIO Summit 2006 Bangkok http://www.idc.com.sg/CIO_Summit2006/ Default.asp

Tunisia 14-16 November, 2005 WFIS 2005 World Forum on Information SocietyDigital Divide, Global Development and the Information Society, Tunis http://irfd.org/events/wf2005/

16-18 November, 2005 WSIS: World Summit on the Information Society Phase 2, Tunis http://www.itu.int/wsis

United States 17-19 November, 2005 4th WSEAS International Conference on eActivities, Florida http://www.worldses.org/conferences/2005/florida/ e-activities/index.html

25-26 May, 2006 ICTD 2006 Berkeley, California http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/events/ictd2006

Get your event listed here. www.i4d.csdms.in/events October 2005 | www.i4d.csdms.in

I N F ACT

Aiding partnerships The United Nations Millennium Declaration embodies an agreement that developing countries will work to maintain sound economies, to ensure their own development and to address human and social needs. Developed countries, in turn, agree to support poorer countries through aid, trade and debt relief. A meaningful partnership between rich and poor countries must also address developing countries’ need for technology, medicines and jobs for their populations, particularly for the growing ranks of young people. The MDG financing gap for all low-income countries will amount to $73 billion in 2006 and rise to $135 billion by 2015. Thanks to rising domestic resource mobilisation, the share of official development assistance in financing incremental investments (that is, the MDG financing gap) will fall from 59 percent in 2006 to 32 percent by 2015. Many countries—particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa— will require sustained budget support of more than 10 percent of GDP through 2015. The map underscores that because of rising incomes several countries, Bolivia, India, and Indonesia among them, will graduate from the need for official development assistance before 2015. The aid delivery mechanism need to be improved for reforming the multistakeholder partnership goal.

Recommendations for reforming development partnerships Shortcoming

Recommendation

Purpose and process Aid processes are not MDG-based

Development partners should affirm the MDGs as the operational objective of the development system, with country-level MDG-based poverty reduction strategies as the anchoring process for development support, based on needs.

Support strategies are inadequately differentiated by country need

Development partners should differentiate support by country needs, whether for budget support, emergency assistance, or simply technical support.

Development is a longterm process, but short-run processes dominate

Development partners should support countries to put forward 3- to 5-year MDGbased poverty reduction strategies that are anchored in a 10-year needsbased framework through 2015. In confict countries, a shorter time frame may be more appropriate.

Technical support Technical support is not adequate for scaling up to the MDGs

Technical support should focus on supporting governments to develop and implement nationally owned MDG-based poverty reduction strategies.

Multilateral agencies are inadequately coordinated

The UN Resident Coordinator system should be dramatically strengthened to coordinate agencies’ technical contributions to the MDG-based poverty reduction strategies.

Development finance Development finance is not needs-based or set to meet the MDGs

ODA should be set by the MDG .nancing gaps outlined in the MDG-based poverty reduction strategies. For many well governed low-income countries, this will imply a substantial increase in ODA and funding of recurrent costs.

Debt relief is not aligned with the MDGs

“Debt sustainability,” particularly Paris Club debt, should be evaluated as the debt level consistent with countries achieving the MDGs.

Development finance is of very poor quality This will imply a dramatic acceleration of debt relief for many heavily indebted countries. System issues Major MDG priorities are systematically overlooked

For well governed countries, a much larger share of ODA should take the form of budget support. For all developing countries, donor agencies should also follow through on their commitments outlined in the Rome harmonisation agenda.

Donor countries show a persistent lack of coherence in their policies

Within the needs-based approach to development assistance, development partners should increase attention to issues like long-term scienti.c capacities, environmental conservation, regional integration, sexual and reproductive health, and cross-border infrastructure. Donors should evaluate their development, finance, foreign, and trade policies for coherence with respect to supporting the MDGs. Donors should subject themselves to at least the same standards of transparency as they expect of developing countries, with independent technical reviews.

Source: Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals

i4d | October 2005