The Need: Digital Inclusion for rural and underserved communities
Much of the developing world exists below subsistence levels and remains impoverished because people lack access to basic infrastructure that is essential for economic development. While the internet and World Wide Web are vital to the promoting communication, learning, training and business development, geographic location limits computer access for a huge number of people. Electricity and communication facilities, essential pillars for economic growth, are not yet planned for most rural communities. Creating sustainable public-access communications facilities in rural areas usually requires outside expertise, solar power and satellite bandwidth.
One initiative that has brought digital inclusion is the community-based telecenter. The typical telecenter has a public access area with computers, phones, and faxes (and sometimes a photocopier and/or video equipment), a training space and at least one full-time staff person. Such centers allow even the most remote village to communicate and exchange information with the rest of the world, and to locally access and produce information for development by integrating ICTs with local radio that reaches communities in their own language. The addition of training courses and facilitators ensures that the ICT resources can be used by the literate and illiterate alike, by teachers and students, health workers and patients, farmers and small business owners.
Telecenters follow different models and can operate as individual businesses, as part of a franchise or as a multi-branch company. They may be owned or operated by government departments,
schools, community organisations and NGOs. They are found in co-operatives, libraries, community centres, churches, and farmers' groups, or even operated by a community radio station.
Telecenters provide an invaluable gateway to our global knowledge society. However, since their start in 1985, only a few hundred telecenters have been launched worldwide. Demand for them is at least 2,500 times higher than current supply.
