Document(s) 7 of 18

Introduction

It is indisputable that advances in microelectronics and telecommunications in conjunction with the results of convergence of the technologies with the resultant new information and communication technologies, during the final quarter of the last century have transformed the way the world works. This transformation is unparalleled since the industrial revolution. This new revolution, the technology revolution, has the added quality of driving change at a much faster pace. It took almost five hundred years for the steam engine to spread throughout the world, whereas the Internet, developed in the 1970s, has reached all the continents and is still spreading fast. In 1996 only five African countries had Internet capability, today all are connected and internet-enabled. This new age variously labelled the computer, Internet, or information age commoditizes knowledge ensuring that the information and knowledge rich are also rich by other more conventional measures. This has translated into a divide whose contours appear to trace earlier demarcations of rich and poor societies, of developed and developing countries.

The information revolution of the late twentieth century has introduced significant changes in the nature of human interactions and relations between peoples and nations. One word that epitomizes the nature of the change wrought by the new order is globalization. Globalization is a contemporary global pre-occupation and its pre-eminent vehicle, information and communication technologies. Globalization is resulting in integrated world markets as never before and we are reminded frequently that those nations which remain un-integrated will fail to derive the benefits of large scale and international trade or the other benefits of the new information and communication technologies. While most developed countries are well on their way to fully integrating the new technologies, developing countries, and Africa in particular, are much further behind in adopting their use. The result of this differential adoption is the digital divide.

Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are at the bottom of the list of world regions in digital prosperity and opportunity. On account they are currently receiving considerable attention from the contemporary global preoccupation with bridging the digital divide. The widespread and high-level engagement with the digital divide does not stem primarily from benign good neighbourliness but from calculated interests addressed at reaping the handsome benefits of digital opportunities wherever these may be found. It is said on one hand that the less ICT developed countries are not able to participate effectively in the accelerated process of globalization and acceleration of growth and transformation of work and factors of production now occurring as a result of these tools. On the other hand, the ICT developed countries cannot effectively and efficiently globalize capitalist expansion into new and emerging markets without a minimum existence of the requisite ICT tools.

The entire world economic system is undergoing changes. Work structures, systems and organizations are being transformed. New economic dynamics of space and time in relation to work are emerging. Global competition and globalizing business, now the norm, means that international capital is likely to go to countries that have the facilities and tools needed for the modern economy. New opportunities for creating wealth and economic growth through ICTs have been demonstrated in countries able to take advantage of their potential. ICTs are also widely believed to be useful in the positive transformation of governance as they improve the opportunities and capability of individuals and marginalized groups to participate in the process. Although the penetration and use of ICTs is still very low in the African continent in comparison to more developed countries, a number of examples currently exist of how ICTs are being exploited and deployed to improve the lives and livelihoods of Africans (see examples of novel ICT use).

Encouraging as these developments are, there are still too few of these examples largely because of the poor communication infrastructure, the low level of ICT penetration and the limits imposed by weak supporting environments necessary for the effective use of ICTs in Africa.

The remainder of this chapter provides some more detail of the context of the more widespread ICTs within which initiatives geared towards improving access have grown and concludes with a look at telecentres as the new public information access points.

Examples of novel ICT use

• A local Internet service provider in Morocco has a contract to digitize the National Library of France’s paper archives. The documents are scanned in France, sent by satellite link to Morocco, and edited by keyboard operators in Rabat.
• In Togo and Mauritius, call centres now provide telephone support services for international companies with customers in Europe and North America. Callers do not realize they are calling Mauritius or Togo. They pick up the phone, dial a local number, and are routed to one of these countries where the operators provide the support that they require.
• In Cape Verde ‘virtual security guards’ have jobs using the Internet to monitor web cams in office parks on the east coast of the United States. They notify local rapid response teams in the US if they see anything amiss.
• Many African craft makers are selling their wares on the world-wide-web, supported by NGOs such as PeopleLink.
• The government of Lesotho recently declared that all announcements for cabinet and committee meetings would be made only be email.
• Some governments, such as those in South Africa, Algeria, and Tunisia, now provide immediate global access to tender offers via the Internet.
• In South Africa, the results of blood tests are being transmitted to remote clinics that are not connected to the national telecommunications grid via mobile telephone text messages.
• In Uganda a local women’s organization the Council for the Economic Empowerment of Women in Africa (CEEWA) posts prices and market information for agricultural commodities regularly on its web site and women in rural trading centres can access this information at a number of community telecentres to determine which market to take their wares and what to charge for them.
• In Senegal local fishing communities are using Personal Digital Assistants to improve distribution and marketing of their products and improving their incomes.

ICTs in Africa: Context and background

The continental ICT landscape has changed dramatically since the last decade of the 1990s. Much of this change, instigated by international action and contained in multilateral agreements has been geared towards creating spaces for global international capital. Quite often, international development action follows the trends and directions established by the conventions and treaties. Much of the recent ICT activity and activism as was the case with the radio and television (mass media) in the 1960s, has been bolstered by external support.

Broadcasting

Television and radio broadcasting are widely available. However, radio is by far the most dominant mass communication instrument or medium in Africa. Ownership of radio sets is far higher than for any other electronic device. It is estimated for example that in 1997 radio ownership in Africa was close to 170 million and growing at a rate of 4% per annum. The estimate for 2002 was over 200 million radio sets. The corresponding figure for television sets is put at 62 million. It is estimated that over 60% of the population of the sub-continent is reached by existing radio networks whereas national television coverage is largely confined to the major towns. Some countries still do not have national television broadcasting stations and even relatively well-resourced Botswana only launched its national television broadcasting station in 2002.

The number of commercial and community radio stations is steadily increasing following liberalization of the broadcast sector in many countries. But, a large portion of the news and information output is often rebroadcast from either national (state-owned/operated) broadcast news, or international broadcast news from agencies such as Voice of America, the BBC or Radio France International.

Satellite-based broadcasting has seen a major boost in activity on the continent in the last few years. In 1995, the South African company M-Net launched the world’s first digital direct-to-home subscriber satellite service called DSTV. Subscribers have access to over 30 video channels and 40 audio programmes on C-band to the whole of Africa and on lower-cost Ku-band to Southern Africa, south of Lusaka. In 2001, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) the national broadcaster launched Channel Africa, a new satellite-based continent-wide news and entertainment channel. In 1998, WorldSpace, a United States-based company launched a commercial digital radio broadcasting satellite called AfriStar to which broadcasters in Europe, the United States, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, and South Africa have signed up. WorldSpace aims to make over 80 audio channels available to listeners on the continent who can afford the 50 or so US dollars to purchase the special digital receiver.

Community radio broadcasting has had a slow take-off and local community broadcast stations are still few with Ghana, Mali, South Africa, and Uganda being the exceptions with a number of new community radio licensees. There is also a growing interest in transforming community telecentres or at the very least linking them with community radio stations as the ultimate information convergence scheme using the same facilities to access the Internet, and for better radio programming. This project is however still very much in its infancy.

Telecommunications

There have been significant changes in the telecommunications sector in Africa in the recent past. These changes have been on three broad fronts. There have been policy changes, institutional innovations, as well as technical and operational changes all of which have been catalysed by new liberalization and privatisation regimes. Partly on account of these a substantial increase in the rate of expansion and modernization of fixed line (terrestrial) networks is taking place, accompanied by an explosion in mobile networks and satellite-based telecommunication services.

The number of fixed lines grew at about 9% annually between 1995 and 2001. The sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) fixed-line teledensity in 2001 was one per 130 inhabitants. Taking into account population growth, the effective annual increase in lines is therefore only 6%. Most of the existing telecommunications infrastructure does not reach the majority of the population because most of the available capacity is concentrated in capital cities. In some 15 African countries (more than 70% of the fixed lines are still located in the largest city (ITU, 2002). Between 1995 and 2001 the number of fixed lines nearly doubled increasing from 12.5 million to 21 million across Africa. Much of this growth took place in North and South Africa with the former having 11.4 million lines and South Africa, 5 million. Sub-Saharan Africa, with about 10% of the world’s population (626 million), currently has only 0.2% of the world’s 1 billion telephone lines. When compared with other low-income countries (all of which house 40% of the world’s population and 10% of the telephone lines), the telephone penetration on the subcontinent is about five times worse than the “average” low-income country.

Although telecommunications infrastructure is beginning to spread, domestic use has until recently been largely confined to a small elite that can afford the high cost of owning a telephone. There are huge variations between countries in installation charges, line rental, and call tariffs. ITU figures reported for 2002 show that for an average-size business in Africa installation costs over USD 100, rental, USD 6 a month, and USD 0.11 for a 3-minute local call. In some countries e.g., Egypt, Benin, Mauritania, Niger, and Togo, installation charges exceed USD 200 while line rentals range from USD 0.8 to USD 20 a month, and call charges vary by a factor of 10; from USD 0.60 an hour to over USD 5 an hour. Thus on average the cost of renting a connection on the continent is almost 20% of GDP per capita, as opposed to a world average of 9% and 1% in high-income countries. Public telephones do not compensate for the high cost of maintaining private telephone connections by being ubiquitous. On the contrary, the numbers are still much lower than in other parts of the world. In 2001 there were about 350,000 public telephones in the entire continent, 75,000 of these in sub-Saharan Africa (about 1 for every 8,500 people), compared with a world average of 1 for every 500 people and a high-income country average of 1 for every 200 people.

The most dramatic changes in the telecommunications landscape in the last decade of the second millennium have been witnessed with mobile telephone networks. Mobile phone subscribers now outnumber fixed-line users in most countries and with numbers reaching a total of 24 million subscriptions in 2001, this uptake demonstrates the unmet need for basic voice services, which state-run fixed network operators have been unable to fulfil in their long years of monopoly. On account of relatively lower costs and long-range cellular base stations, many rural areas have also benefited from mobile coverage. These developments and a number of new communication products have been catalysed by the growing satellite coverage over the continent.

A growing phenomenon is for governments to thrust some of the responsibility for providing public telephony to the private sector through franchises and other arrangements. This partly explains the rapid growth of public ‘phone shops’ and ‘teleboutiques’ in many countries. The best-known example is in Senegal, which has over 10,000 commercially run public telephone bureaus popularly called telecentres, which employ more than 15,000 people and generate a sizeable chunk of national revenues. Although most of the telecentres are in urban areas, many are being established in remote rural locations. Some telecentres are now providing Internet access and other more advanced ICT services.

In rural areas, which usually lie outside the fixed (grid) infrastructure, the numbers of public call centres using mobile networks to provide services are growing, but the cost of mobile services is prohibitive for most rural folk. At about USD 0.50 per minute on average, regular telephone calls or Internet access is too expensive for them. One reason for the high cost of mobile telephony is related to interconnection. Mobile networks usually depend on the terrestrial telecommunication infrastructure that is often owned and controlled by the premier telecom (usually the national incumbent) for call termination. This dependence translates into financial relations with the incumbent telecom and this is ultimately reflected in call and user charges. Currently, interconnection is a big issue across the continent as mobile operators and terrestrial service providers are locked in financial battles over appropriate fees. Even between mobile operators themselves there are also issues of interconnection when calls originate from one network and terminate in another.

In South Africa as in some other countries (e.g., Kenya), licensed mobile operators have Universal Service obligations which make it imperative for them not only to provide services to rural areas but also at subsidized tariffs. This means that while mobile services have a chance of growing in rural areas, fixed line phone shops that cannot compete with the lower GSM tariffs cannot sustain businesses in rural settings. As a result, terrestrial telephony, the base for more advanced (Internet, heavy data transfer) and secure services cannot be nurtured beyond the urban centres. However, SMS gateways to the Internet are now allowing access to limited data such as commodity and market prices and weather reports in some countries such as Uganda and Kenya.

The Internet

Since its creation in the 1970s, the Internet and the products it has spurned, e.g., email have become very powerful tools for information and communication and a commonly used short-hand indicator of a country’s level of ICT adoption and integration.

In Africa, the pattern of Internet diffusion has been similar to that of mobile telephone networks. Although not as widespread, the Internet whose introduction preceded the mobile phone made an early foothold and impact at the top end of business, in wealthy families, primarily in the major urban areas. The non-profit sector; academic institutions and NGOs pioneered Internet use in the early 1990s, fuelled by their need for low cost international communications. Private Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and national telecom operators subsequently took it up and seem to be dominating the field currently. Table 2 shows that sub-Saharan Africa’s Internet use grew between 1998 and 2000 but at a slower rate than other parts of the world. Sub-Saharan Africa along with South Asia, are located at the bottom of the scale in worldwide Internet usage.

Table 2. Internet users as percentage of total population

Source: UNDP World Development Report 2001.

Arguments abound in respect of the true value of an indicator such as Internet subscriber-ship as a reflection of the number of users on account of the ubiquity of shared, dormant and unused or unusable accounts. The relatively high and rapidly growing use of public access services such as cybercafés and telecentres, make it genuinely difficult to measure the total number of Internet users in Africa. Although the number of dialup subscriber accounts is readily available, these figures are only a partial gauge of the size of the Internet sector and should be examined together with other factors such as the quantity of international traffic from each country, and the available national bandwidth.

The phenomenal growth of Internet use seen in the 1990s has slowed in most countries. Almost all African capital cities and some secondary towns currently have points of presence (POPs). About 280 are scattered in different locations across the continent. Some argue that the slow down is because the bulk of the users who can afford a computer and telephone have already obtained connections. As of mid-2002, the number of dialup Internet subscribers was close to 1.7 million, 20% up from 2001, bolstered mainly by growth in a few countries such as Nigeria. Of these subscribers, North Africa and South Africa between them are responsible for about 1.2 million, leaving about 500,000 for the other 49 sub-Saharan African countries. If we assume that each computer with an Internet or email connection supports a range of three to five users, this puts current estimates of the number of African Internet users at about 5 to 8 million.

Currently, the average total cost of using a local dialup Internet account for 20 hours a month in Africa is about USD 60 per month (usage fees and local call telephone time included, but not telephone line rental). ISP subscription charges vary between USD 10 and USD 80 a month. The charges are higher than those in the USA or Europe and the charge of 60 USD per month is high for the average monthly income of say a middle-level professional in the public sector in Africa. Twenty hours of Internet access including telephone charges in the United States cost USD 22 per month in 2000, in Germany; USD 33, and across the European Union; USD 39. The per capita incomes in these countries are much higher than in Africa sometimes 10 times greater than the African average. This state of affairs is a reflection of the imperfect nature of the interactions between market forces and government monopolies, which in turn reflect the levels of maturity in markets, the different regulations guiding data transmission services and varying tariff policies.

As a way of improving Internet use, some countries have instituted local call charges for calls to the Internet regardless of distance. This greatly reduces costs for those in remote areas and increases the viability of Internet services provided by rural telecentres. Nineteen countries have adopted this strategy to date: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Mauritania, Morocco, Namibia, Niger, Senegal, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. In the Seychelles Internet charges are 50% of the normal rate of local voice calls

But most rural users (and telecentres) still have to make costly long distance calls to connect to the Internet. The high cost of Internet use limits individual use, and creates demand for public telecentres where the cost of a single telephone line (account) can be shared among a host of customers who would not otherwise be able to afford access. Telecentres, cybercafés, telekiosks, etc., address the low-income levels of users by sharing the cost and maintenance of equipment and connectivity amongst a larger number of users. Lower-cost email-only services and free web-based services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, or Excite are very popular. A number of African ISPs such as Africa Online and Mail Africa have set up their own low-cost web-based email services in response.

Internet-based content and applications continue to expand, albeit at a slow rate, and there is still too little attractive, practical or relevant content or easily available applications for the average African Internet user. There are a handful of official general government web sites, such as those of Angola, Egypt, Gabon, Lesotho, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, Togo, Tunisia, and Zambia, but there is very little government use of the Internet for administrative purposes. Web content is higher in some sectors, e.g., tourism, foreign investment and current affairs. In 1999, the Columbia University African Studies Department identified over 120 different newspapers and news magazines available on the Internet, published in 23 countries. The countries best represented included Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Outside of South Africa and perhaps a couple of others, few organizations are using the web to deliver significant quantities of information or carry out transactions. Although large numbers of organizations now have a “brochure” website with basic descriptive and contact information, very few actually use the Internet for real business activities. The limited number of nationals with access to the Internet or actively using it for conducting common everyday business is still small. This is aggravated by the widespread absence and use of credit cards, limited skills and expertise for digitizing and coding pages, and the high costs of local web-hosting services. Universal smart card and e-commerce policies are receiving attention in a number of countries as one way to deal with the situation. Mauritius and South Africa are looking at a single smart card that will allow the public to hold drivers’ licence data, small amounts of funds for light transactions, and health and other social security information.

ICT equipment and other contextual factors

Recent estimates for the number of personal computers in Africa put the total at about 7.5 million for 2001 – an average of about 1 per 100 people. But due to limited capacity for industry monitoring and the large numbers of machines smuggled in to avoid taxes and import duties, the figures are notoriously unreliable. Official figures may be overestimated by up to three to six times, in which case the average ratio of computers to people could be close to 1 to 500. It is common practice to find multiple users for a single computer. 

Underutilization of existing computer resources is also common, often caused by the preponderance of many stand-alone computers in the same office with no use of Local Area Networks (LANs or WANs). Offices quite often have many PCs, but only one is usually fitted with a modem connected to the Internet.

The high cost of computer hardware and software licensing is a major hurdle. As a result increasing attention is being directed toward the use of recycled PCs, thin client solutions, set-top boxes, and other low-cost ‘appliances’, and applications, Open Source and free software. As if the high purchasing costs are not bad enough, many national tax regimes still treat computers, communications equipment, peripherals and cellular phones as luxury items. Since they are so categorized and because they are almost exclusively imported, duties and taxes on them are very high. This adds to their retail price making them doubly expensive. Although there have been notable efforts in some countries, e.g., Uganda, to reduce or remove import duties on computers, levies are still commonly charged and often at high rates. In some cases international development assistance projects are to import equipment duty-free but this is not standard practice and a number of ICT projects have experienced long delays as a result of matters related to unresolved taxes or duties on equipment.

Other factors also colour the landscape and influence the degree of success that ICT projects can achieve. Of supreme importance is electricity. Electricity drives ICTs yet irregular or nonexistent electricity supplies are a common feature and a major problem in Africa, especially outside the major towns. Many countries have extremely limited power distribution networks that do not penetrate significantly into rural areas. Although substantial improvements have taken place over the last few years, power cuts (regular scheduled power outages for many hours) are still common occurrences, even in capital cities (Accra, Dar-es-Salaam, and Lagos). Like electricity, road, rail, and air transport networks are poorly developed, costly to use, and often in bad condition, resulting in barriers to the movement of people and goods. These networks are critical for the development and maintenance of ICT infrastructure – telephone lines, communications networks etc.

A big headache is the generally low level of education and literacy, especially scientific and technical literacy among the population, which has created a great scarcity of technical skills and expertise at all levels. This is compounded by the very low pay scales in the African civil service that are a chronic problem for governments and NGOs, and guarantee the continual loss of the brightest and most experienced IT technicians to the private sector and in some instances to more developed countries in a never ending stream of ‘brain drain’. Rural areas in particular suffer similarly as most enterprising skilled technicians find better jobs in the big cities.

Finally, the policies and business climate of the ICT sector in Africa, suffer from well-known ailments: small markets divided by arbitrary borders, non-transparent and time-consuming business registration and licensing procedures, limited opportunities (due largely to the historic pattern of monopolies and high levels of state control), scarce local capital, currency instability, exchange controls and inflation.

Some of the contextual issues are currently being addressed by a number of efforts and proposals. The African Information Society Initiative (AISI) and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) come readily to mind. The AISI is a framework for the formulation and development of national information and communication infrastructure (NICI) to address national development priorities in every African country, which simultaneously calls for cooperation among African countries in the sharing of experiences, expertise and resources. With support from the UNECA and a number of other international organizations many countries have commenced the articulation and implementation of national NICI plans, and 17 countries have finalized their strategies: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Gambia, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, South Africa, Sudan, and Tunisia. High on the list of priorities in many of the countries is improvement of access to ICTs in rural areas through the use of public access points popularly called telecentres.

Toward universal service: Telecentres and public access

Efforts to promote universal access to ICTs in Africa have been on the agenda of meetings of high-level policymakers since the early 1990s. An important watershed in the maturation of the idea of universal access and of the emergence of community telecentres is the first World Telecommunications Development Conference in 1994, which produced the Buenos Aires declaration. Further official recognition was given to the issue in 1996 when the Conference of African Ministers of Social and Economic Planning requested the UN Economic Commission for Africa to set up a ‘high-level working group’ to chart Africa’s path to the global information highway. The result was the framework document that created the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), which was adopted by Ministers of Planning. Since this historic beginning, communications ministers from over 40 African countries have endorsed the AISI and AISI activities are still continuing. One area of priority action in the AISI engendered NICI plans is the improvement of access to ICTs usually referred to as Universal access in rural areas for which telecentres are a recent strategy.

The telecentre concept has since received considerable attention and support from the international development community, a number of national governments, public telecom operators as well as private telecom service providers. This attention has translated into many pilot telecentre projects scattered across the developing world. Over 20 projects have been implemented in Ghana, Mozambique, Uganda, Benin, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Along with the IDRC, which produced one of the first studies of telecentres (Fuchs 1997), many development agencies are active in this area including the British Council, CDG, CTA, FAO, IICD, ITU, UNDP, UNESCO, the World Bank, and USAID.

Definition and development of telecentres

Nomenclature

The telecentre idea was born less than twenty years ago in 1985 in Velmdalen a small farming village in Sweden. The concept is recognised and called by a large number of very different names. There is little doubt that the names by which the telecentre is known will change (grow or shrink who can tell?) as the movement matures and globalizes. To date the idea has been generally adopted in the United States, Canada and Australia. In Africa and Asia the notion is still taking root.

Taxonomy

As indicated in chapter 1, the form and functions of the various facilities subsumed under the umbrella notion of telecentre vary. This is understandable and in some way to be expected. The telecentre is a phenomenon still in discovery and in the various places where it is created, the local context colours its final form. It is an instrument for development whose adaptation and mutation is far from complete and perhaps not for some time yet. As a result, attempts to classify the currently existing types are still quite unsophisticated.

Gomez et al (1999b) identify five types of telecentres:

• Basic telecentre, usually located in rural marginalized areas where there is limited access to basic services in general where training of potential users is a popular service in addition to internet access.
• Telecentre franchise, a series of independently owned and managed interconnected telecentres usually supervised by a local organization, which offers technical and on occasion, financial support.
• Civil telecentre, usually the most common, where a public organization such as a university opens up its facilities like computers for use by the public and the telecentre services tend to be an addition to the other day to day activities of the organization.
• Cybercafé, commercial in nature and found in affluent neighbourhoods or hotels and in major towns and cities; and
• The multi purpose community centre, one of the newer models recently introduced in a number of countries offering more specialised services such as tele-medicine.

The difficulty with the classification by Gomez et al is that the distinguishing criteria are mixed and the logic hard to comprehend. In one instance it is based on location (cybercafé), in the next, on the nature of ownership (civil telecentre) and in another, on the type of services offered (basic telecentre). The classification attempted by Collee and Roman (1999) shows the complexity and identify the dimensions that any taxonomy would do well to consider.

On the basis of their classification (Collee and Roman 1999), it is possible to distinguish the following telecentre types:

• Public/private
• Publicly or privately funded
• Commercial (fee-based)/free
• Urban/rural
• Narrow-focus/multi-purpose
• Independent/networked, grouped
• Community/establishment-based
• Stand alone/attached
• Profit/service
• Thematic/universal

There still appears to be work before we arrive at a satisfactory and exhaustive classification of telecentres. Like the naming and grouping of telecentres, the nature of the development and evolution of these facilities is still being theorized.

Evolution of telecentres

While there appears to be a general consensus about the basic function of telecentres, there is a debate around the nature of optimal ownership, management and operations. Fuchs (1997), for instance, suggests the function of telecentres to be the provision of “public access to communication and information for economic, social and cultural development. . .” and Zongo (1999) concurring states that the telecentre “provides telecommunication and information services for a range of developmental aims”.

It has been suggested that the ownership, management and operations evolve over time and three stages have been described. Fuchs (1997), identified the investment, contract and user fee stages.

• The investment stage is seen as characterizing the early state where a non-profit making organization forms a partnership with a local community in an attempt to build community capacity through encouraging them to participate in the information society. At this stage the organization finances the information technology initiatives, provides
  equipment and training for local partners, key persons and staff, as a way of demonstrating practical utility.
• In the contract stage the telecentre has gained autonomy from the “parent” organizations and starts to make contractual agreements with other agencies such as government departments or other organizations, e.g., hospitals or schools building up a clientele to which it provides services as well as technical support in the setting up of their facilities.
• By the time the telecentre gets to the user fee stage donor dependency is a thing of the past, since by this time the communities are well aware of the products and benefits of the telecentre and are therefore willing to pay for services.

The implication of an evolutionary view is that it is only a matter of time and maturity before telecentres become independent and self-sustaining or sustainable. There is however some difficulty with this position. The evolutionary thesis, gives slight attention to motivational issues and the wide variety of telecentres, and appears to pertain more to one type of telecentre; the public development-oriented telecentre. To be fair, these were the types investigated by Fuchs. The preoccupation with sustainability and economic independence of this particular type of telecentre has continued to dominate discussions partly on account of the current insistence on market logic and the business model. Yet few examples of telecentres at the user fee stage have been described in the literature and this is perhaps proof that not enough time has elapsed for the evolution to advance to this stage or that other conceptual and theoretical models need to be constructed to explain and account for the full spectrum of experiences. On the other hand, the reality of many failed telecentres underscores the importance of economic viability. How to achieve this remains a big question. Other questions also abound.

Glimpses from the literature

Despite the recency of the movement and the relative paucity of telecentre research, or perhaps on account of it, a number of unresolved and pertinent issues emerge in the available literature. Careful reading of the literature suggests that sustainability is multidimensional and dependent on more than just the availability of financial resources. Factors commonly associated with sustainability include the operating environment, ownership and management styles, community participation, relevance of services and content. The logic of the market seems to place great premium on what in the literature is referred to as access – numbers of users and types of usage. The political rationale for the entire telecentre movement is predicated on this Universal Access criterion. The notion of universal access, which can be traced to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 19 in particular provided the fodder for the expansion of information and communication services to all without discrimination. Telecentres are seen as instruments in the battle for universal access especially in poor countries and environments. Data pictures from telecentres suggest that access is still limited, i.e., not available to all and some groups are favoured while others are marginalized. Women have been shown to be particularly vulnerable (Karelse and Sylla 2000; Rathgeber 2000, 2002; Hafkin 2002). Use is most pronounced among young educated men (Kyabwe and Kibombo 1999). The literature points to several factors that affect access directly and indirectly. Foremost is cost. The high cost of establishing the facilities and maintaining the services means that there cannot be nearly as any as there ought to be to cater for the extent of demand. The start-up cost of telecentres in South Africa is said to be as high as USD 40,000 (Benjamin and Dahms 1999). Grants for two-year projects can be anywhere between USD100,000 and USD500,000, depending on the types and numbers of equipment. Operating costs were often overlooked in early projects (Delgadillo and Borja 1999).

The cost of use (user fees/charges) for potential clients is also a significant hurdle. Telecentres usually charge user fees and although these are often low and subsidized, there is the feeling that the fees are high for poor people with little disposable incomes – women and younger people in general. Another aspect, which directly affects access and use, is the location of the telecentre. Like schools and hospitals in colonial towns as opposed to traditional markets, telecentres that are not carefully sited have been shown to draw fewer customers (Kyabwe and Kibombo 1999) on account of physical inaccessibility. In addition to the location, the physical layout/plan, and the psychological accessibility of the telecentre have been shown to influence patronage. Some users value privacy, which is not always guaranteed in telecentres and the power of psychological dimensions of use, has been pointed out (Baron 1999; Harris 1999; Cisler et al 1999).

The language used in the telecentre is as important as the cost of services, if not more, for access. The language of operations and the language of services, i.e., language of the content and the holdings (books, websites, videos, manuals, etc) are very important. It has been suggested that English language (the language of ICTs) is often a barrier to learning about new technologies in contexts where most people are either non-literate or semi-illiterate (Dandar 1999; Delgadillo and Borja 1999). Other than acting as a barrier to comprehension and ultimately social change, the language question also borders on relevance. Taking account of the low levels of English language literacy and the ubiquity of vernacular in the rural locations, the relevance of material in English language is highly questionable.

Other factors, which affect the success of telecentres highlighted in the literature, are operative at the micro and macro socio-political levels and include such aspects as the national policy environment and local social arrangements for the control and management of facilities. In the late 1990s the move to create new policy instruments that would support growth in the sector on a continent-wide scale commenced with the Africa Information Society Initiative and Africa Development Forum. The moderate harvest of new National Information and Communication Infrastructure plans or ICT policies in about a third of the countries is testimony that things are indeed changing. At the level of the telecentres themselves management and local community involvement appear to have some influence on telecentre outcomes and fortunes. Sound management and high level community support are prescribed for success yet in places community involvement may be disruptive if and when community members active in the facility have different or hidden agendas. Community ownership is also believed to be related to success but models of true ownership are rare since most community telecentres are not genuinely owned or completely administered by the communities.

Conclusion

Although the telecentre movement and its study is still in infancy, available research sheds light on some of the issues while pointing directions for further research and theory building to guide the practical implementation and establishment of more telecentres. Menou (1999) and Gomez et al (1999) suggest that the search for parameters, indicators and tools to assess the impact of ICTs for development is a long way from complete. But perhaps most urgently required is a robust theory that explains the relationship between telecentres and development (Heeks 2002). The urgency is intoned to avoid the mis-application of a potentially powerful tool as the world appears poised to implement a massive roll-out and adoption of ICTs in this century.

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