Summary

This report reviews the process of design and implementation of the USAID funded PC3 telecentre project for rural Bulgaria. While Bulgaria is not a developing country and is quickly approaching EU ascension a digital divide exists within the country that separates urban and rural inhabitants. While little more than 10% of the population uses the Internet, over 60% of those users were located in Sofia. The assumption is that extension of ICTs to rural communities will contribute to their economic, democratic, and educational development. The model was developed from observations and lessons learned from other global telecentre programmes. This PC3 project supports rural entrepreneurs by providing technical assistance, hardware/software subsidies and ongoing technical and business management support.

Key Points

The goals of the Bulgarian PC3 project are to create employment and human resource development in areas with high unemployment; to increase the level of ICT skills in the community; to improve the ability of small to medium sized enterprises (SMSEs) to seek and evaluate timely market information; to provide a central meeting place for the community dialogue; to make government and social program information more accessible; to improve access to training, research and education resources; and to create incentives for young people to remain in the villages whilst gaining the skills necessary to participate in the globalized world.

The PC3 Telecentre is presented as a new approach to IT service provision in under-served communities because it addresses issues of sustainability by developing partnerships with local entrepreneurs and combining both for-profit and “public good” services into a sound business plan. The PC3s were targeted in each small community at educators, students, health workers, local administrators and vulnerable groups. The products and service mix of the PC3s varies but is typical of many telecentres worldwide: Internet access, printing, scanning, faxing, etc. However, unlike other telecentres, the PC3 project was strongly focused on entrepreneurial development. Instead of a process of internal selection on the part of the donor agencies and project directorate as to the location for pilot projects, Requests for Proposals (RFPs) were widely disseminated to rural communities throughout Bulgaria. The more than 90 proposals from 75 towns were then evaluated with a set of criteria that looked at the entrepreneurs understanding of the PC3 concepts, contribution, business plan, and the features of the town proposed (including infrastructure capability. The selected candidates were then placed in a training program (akin to a business incubator) and provided with technical assistance, hardware, ISP subsidies and startup marketing assistance in the form of publicly distributed pre-paid cards.

The cards were intended to encourage the targeted members of the community to utilize the PC3s and increase their IT skills and awareness. In addition, the card system ensured an immediate demand for the telecentre's services and reduced the initial business risk for the operators. Each of the ten PC3 communities received a number of these cards proportionate to the population that were then distributed to “public good” users such as teachers, health workers, etc. While the project also initially intended to generate local content, (e.g. digitizing Bulgarian information) it was found that a great deal of local language resources and software was already available and so this component has shifted to filling in the gaps.

The author believes that the wide response to the RFPs supports the hypothesis that PC3s are an appropriate solution for the information needs of small Bulgarian communities and that there are valuable lessons to be learned from this project for other regions. The initiative of local PC3 operators is at the heart of this models success.

Source: Public Computer and Communications Centre (PC3) Project

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