[UgaBYTES] [mendenyo] Minimalist Telecentres with 1 computer, or 'A Telecentre in a box'.

[Peter Burgess]

Dear Ronald, Colleagues

Thank you for your feedback (copied below) ... I would expect that
your experience is not unique. It would be interesting to hear other
experiences about the bahavior of other ordinary people in communities
with respect to money ... paying for things, saving, borrowing, etc.

There is a widely held view that microcredit is a successful driver of
community progress. I am less of a believer, in part because it seems
to me that microcredit only addresses a bit of the problem in a
typical community ... personal credit is useful, but there also needs
to be minicredit for the small enterprise (to buy a pick-up truck, for
example) and municredit for the community as a whole (to improve a
critical road link, for example). Can the strategy that has worked for
microcredit ... that is group responsibility for indivual loans ... be
applied on the mini and muni scale?

If we conclude that the community thinks a telecentre services has
value, and would pay for it because of its value ... but cannot pay
for it because the individual just does not have the cash ... what
might be the next step.

Maybe the telecentre should be in partnership or doing a joint venture
with a microcredit operation so that the telecentre clients can borrow
to pay for the services.

Maybe the telecentre should get some minicredit and give credit to its
clients so that they can use the service and pay later ... this
requires pretty good accounting skills, but is not that difficult if
the telecentre management is serious.

Maybe the community should get some municredit and use this to provide
loans to the telecentre.

As you will note I do not encourage grants because, while they are
easy to use, they are rarely sustainable. A loan forces serious
thinking about sustainability on everyones part ... the funding source
and the user.

On 10/24/07, ronald omondi <obobo2002 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Hello Peter
> I also share the same view that is to make communities pay for the telecenters,in that if its given as a grant people always tend not to own up to them and this has made a lot of projects go down the drain. I speaking from experience where sometime back Amref dug toilets and some people could not use them saying that they were the property for Amref and since they changed the approach and they make the people pay a certain percentage for ownwership of the project.
> I beleive that if we were to get telecenters maybe on long trem loans and then the comunity made to pay for it and own it would be more eficient and better manged.
> Ronald
>
> Peter Burgess <peterbNYC at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Colleagues
>
> I like what both Ricardo and Samuel have said.
>
> From my perspective there is a value in more effective communication
> in the local neighborhood. Maybe as much as 95% of valuable
> communication is local, and rather little conversation needs to go
> Internet or international. This suggests the community telecentre
> network connected with WiFi or WiMax or something of that sort ...
> Samuel's model of bigger telecenter (10 computers) and local kiosk
> telecentres (1 computer).
>
> If there is value in this, the communities should have the
> wherewithall to pay for these investments ... and if they do not then
> there needs to be another level of analysis to determine whether there
> is VALUE in these efforts, and whether this value justifies external
> funding either as a grant or as a loan. I favor the loan approach
> simply because it tends to drive decisions in the direction of true
> sustainability.
>
> On 10/23/07, samuel kongere <samkongere2004 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Dear Rich and All.
> >
> > I believe you understand very well the aspect behind having a telecenter at a central point which can generate many services to other communities far and near. These centers are used as a means to deliver Internet and telephone resources to poor communities. Sometimes they are built as or part of existing neighborhood or rural community centers, and sometimes they may be designed as model labs. What they generally have in common is providing communities with a place where they can make and receive phone calls, and access services over the Internet.
> >
> > E-learning structures can and have been built and deployed using free software. I think the concepts of Distributing DVDs is more common in our minds, it is the simplest way to handle the transfer of information and music currently. Although this remains a good fact but flash Disks and drives are taking the lead. The DVDs are more vulnerable and are not durable. The conditions for their use exist elsewhere, and I think the idea would be very workable in Africa to explore the existing gaps.
> >
> > These centers can start small also act as digital public libraries, and be used as local centers for supporting distance learning programs of or adjuncts for other small kiosks with fewer or one computer to help communities understand. Other possibilities include community news and entertainment such as movie distribution, or to enable participatory democracy. Some of these users have not yet even been explored, and I believe should be, using free software projects involving distance learning, for which there are a number of different ones to choose from. One area that is heavily focused on, however, is using telecenters to deliver shared basic phone service to a community. We may think phone wise but many are going to have their own cell phones. The few community pay phones don't make any profit due to monopoly of other companies. I don't know waht other countries use in community pay phones but in our country the rates are expensive than owning an individual cell phone.
> >
> > Community centers can be used both for production and consumption of entertainment and culture. However, we can do better than having stacks of DVD's or VCR's. This can be done using concepts from point-to-point file sharing networks using Flash to enable efficient distribution, both for those producing, and for things being consumed and shared by others.
> >
> > Can a community center become a community movie theatre? A community news center bringing important news from the larger world directly to a local community? Certainly I believe it can and should. This has social and cultural implications, at the local level, and the national level.
> >
> > From the purely technological perspective, all the tools needed to do this exist today. Some work could be done in polishing how they are used for ICT Center specific configurations, but nothing new has to be invented, other than thinking more deeply about how people can and will interact with a telecenter, and how to best enable these interactions. This part of the project then involves social theory.
> >
> > So in other words to describe this; I think one model Center with many computers can serve other smaller ones with fewer or one Computer provided the population is introduced to information transfer and handling. We can be able to get telephone, fax, email, Internet; telemedicine, distance education, news distribution, telecommuting are some of the services offered by the community gathering centers. We need to evaluate if they really respond to the communication and information needs of the communities they are intended to serve? What impact do they have on social equity and economic development? As community information centers become more commonplace across Africa and in other developing regions of the world, these questions take on an increasing urgency.
> >
> > Our Roadmap for expansion (more 'seats', services, WiFi, etc).
> > To reach the last person in the community.
> > Sam
> >
> > Samwel Okech kongere
> > Nyamuga primary school
> > P.O BOX 191,
> > MBITA 040305-KENYA.
> > Cell: +254 725 600 439
> > Information Networking and E-learning Trainings
> > UDOGO youth development/Miniciu-Sodas Laboratories
> >
____________
Peter Burgess
The Transparency and Accountability Network: Tr-Ac-Net in New York
www.tr-ac-net.org
IMMC - The Integrated Malaria Management Consortium Inc.
www.IMMConsortium.org
917 432 1191 or 212 772 6918  peterbnyc at gmail.com