telecentre.org

This article examines telecentre sustainability using experiences from India and Africa to review three telecentre sustainability models. The author's premise is that combining financial and social sustainability of telecentres remains a key challenge more than a decade after the establishment of telecentres as a social, cultural, and economic development experiment. The author analyses the strengths and weaknesses of each of two current approaches and then makes an argument for a new approach - one that will ensure financial sustainability and high social capital leading to expanding community usage.



These three approaches are analysed:

1. The Social Development Approach.
2. The Enterprise or Information Kiosk approach.
3. The Social Enterprise Approach.

The social development approach focuses on helping individuals and communities to address social needs through telecentre use. The social development paradigm has been largely about building social capital (involving person-to-person and institutional interactions for mutual support) as an engine for creativity, networks and sustainable community growth. For telecentres using this approach, financial support is largely through government subsidies and development partners. Their strength is in their community services available to all, such as providing market information, but the approach is weak in financial sustainability.

The enterprise approach develops services for sale, and selects services for their income producing value rather than their social development value. Location is often dictated by market possibilities, excluding low income sectors. Key success factors include availability of infrastructure, a community that knows which services it needs, accompanied with capacity to pay, resulting in a financial sustainability focus. Its low social capital approach suggests that without a strategy to grow and empower the user base, it faces a limited market.



The author proposes a "social enterprise" approach combining aspects of the two earlier approaches. "It pre-supposes that there will be people in the community with no or less capacity to pay for essential services along side those who are happy to pay for felt needs. While tapping into social support systems, it acknowledges the responsibility for financial independence and sustainability as a virtue for telecentres."

The author selects the following possibilities for implementation:

• Offer a number of information services free of charge while running training programmes for a fee or charging for certain services on a cost recovery basis.
• Identify those services users will pay for and move to a partial profit fee structure while continuing to provide services combining social value with economic benefit.
• Maintain community services while charging for non essential enhancements and for those services saving individuals time and resources.
• Make print resources on essential community information like disease management or market pricing available at a low cost or free for social inclusion purposes.

The author concludes by recommending that networking within communities can lead to a balanced social enterprise model addressing both development needs and financial sustainability.