[UgaBYTES] [ciresearchers] FW: telecentre.org newsletter, October 2008

[Rahul Tongia]

Personal bias in the situation - projects seeking funding should be 
careful to distinguish between solvency and liquidity needs for funds.

Clearly, support for liquidity is a key issue (up front capital) but 
there should be a plan for how to sustain it.

This is not a claim that everything should be RoI driven, capitalistic, 
etc. But, even with community/taxpayer/donor/other support, it needs to 
be thought through.

Rahul

************************************************************************
Rahul Tongia, Ph.D.
Senior Systems Scientist

Program in Computation, Organizations, and Society (COS)
School of Computer Science (ISR) /
Dept. of Engineering & Public Policy

Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA
tel: 412-268-5619
fax: 412-268-2338
email: tongia at cmu.edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rtongia



gkwagner at via.at wrote:
> Dear colleague in Africa,
>
> there are three major types of funding:
>
> 1) PUBLIC funding:
> has many disadvantages since the telecenter
> becomes dependent from Government.
>
> 2) BUSINESS funding:
> e.g. by banks, telcos.
> not a PPP, but a private-private funding model.
>
> 3) Even more effective: CITIZEN FUNDING
> establish a kind of foundation/trust
> either in the legal form of association or
> _Genossenschaft_ (sorry, I miss the English term; a kind of trust).
> So 1000 to 2000 citizens became stakeholder in such
> an association and contribute to the telecenter.
>
> You may combine also 2) and 3).
>
> **************
>
> Following the arguments and experience of Klaus
> in Latin America I would recommend more a PRIVATE
> financial model instead of a PUBLIC one.
>
> But you might even try to make a financial mix as
> follows:
> - 25 percent by local government
> - 25 percent by businesses
> - 25 percent by citizens
> - 25 percent by income from selling services
>
> kind regards from Vienna and Belgrade,
>
>
> Gerhard
>
> Zitat von Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com>:
>
>   
>> Good question... My strong sense is that funding opportunities would be
>> country specific that is would be based on either national programs or
>> national/regional programs of the various agencies but I'll share it with
>> the list where I'm sure there is a lot more collective knowledge on this
>> than I possess...
>>
>> You might also want to direct the question to ugabytes
>> ugabytes at lists.ugabytes.org which is a very active and useful list of
>> telecentre managers and others based in Uganda but covering most of
>> sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.
>>
>> MG
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> Sent: October-09-08 3:43 PM
>> To: Michael Gurstein
>> Subject: Re: [ciresearchers] FW: telecentre.org newsletter, October 2008
>>
>>
>>
>> Michael,
>>
>> Do you know of sources of funding for starting
>> a telecentre in a developing country?
>>
>> West Africa is the context.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     
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