Thursday, May 19, 2011

New & Yet Linked to Yesterday's Minds: Telecentre Sustainability


Michael Gurstein, aka MG – you wrote that telecentres can’t be sustainable. You pointed out that; first the location chosen – can’t support sustainability, funders never even thought about it, whatever ICT centre is sustainable - it is taken out of being a telecentre on the basis that it has no social angle – pointing out to cybercafés. As you wrap  up, you note that people can’t pay therefore they can’t be penalized by asking them to pay or withdrawing support because they can’t pay, etc. I agree with most of your reasoning but I aver a little different for closing, and what needs to be done for the future, as I say in what follows:

Telecentres can be sustainable. But 'we' promoting them must change the way we see them first. We must also free ourselves from founding thinking – call it trap, for indeed times have changed and change is bound to continue anyway, so it is not for options that ‘we’ change with it or die. I would like to point out only one example, to explain myself out; that’s, people’s crack about content. It surprises me indeed; I fail to justify monies spent in so called - elusive - local content programs for the rural friends – even up now!



First, users have indicated for a long time that they need services that lift their wellbeing and livelihood - both in speech and expert feel. And what have we done! Pump them with what we think works, from our expert locales - or say what is easy to go with for a project. Pitful it is.

Second, content that is built on story writing and saying, is quite static. And what vexes most, is that, it is often in another language to that of the user groups for which it is intended . You wander, then, in whose interest is this local content! What informs it? Isn’t it only answering issues of yesterday, owing to process length and static nature the resultant product?

Third, to me, content is about information that helps people to take good actions, improve their knowledge of surviving in the never simple life, improve people's competencies to do things, and or help them to help themselves to create new information about their problem, and the means to eliminate it. Literally, content is about people, information and communication – so if one part breaks down, it must be fixed rightly; probably that’s why mobile phones easily found a place in Africa, where 'me2you' oral means of sharing could no longer support the aforesaid parts due to population boom, even when other technologies had been leaping for success. Local content thinking seems to view rural people as though they were in a waterproof box in an Ocean; where the salty water around it couldn’t corrode the box and the contents encased therein. It undermines the fact that rural information, competence and knowledge is mended by scientific finding as much as the vice verse is true; so is it true for rural economy and urban economy; national economy and global economy – the high the interactions the better it is for growth of each of in interaction. As I get off this point, I aver, that the simpler the message or info, the higher the chances that it will influence action, knowledge, competence and new information creation, even when, it remain for understanding how local content remains more detailed than a typical elite’s executive summary or abstract – who then is better at using complex info?

Last, as I come to appreciate Mike’s contribution, and yet put ahead something for the future of telecentres, I ask ‘we’ the promoters of telecentres, what we have done individually and together with the telecentres that we support to ensure that more money directly flows into the pockets of rural people from those of urban or global people and back; and that this cycle keeps a feasibilly high rate of flow. If telecentres can't contribute to the wellbeing and livelihood of an individual it potentially must serve, then – how can we expect the rural folk to contribute to the telecentre's wellbeing and livelihood - it is that simple. The 'conduit' metaphor must be changed to 'service' metaphor. If people earn, telecentres earn too.

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