Introduction

Brief history

Often funding agencies and donor governments face the question on whether they should support ICT activities in their development projects. Should the money be invested in computers and communication devices or will it be better spent on food, shelter, health, and education? The choice need not be ‘either or'. If used intelligently and innovatively, ICTs can form an integral component of development projects as demonstrated by the award-winning Information Village project of M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation.

The project was developed in January 1998 by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation as part of its programme of taking the benefits of emerging and frontier technologies to the rural poor. Professor Swaminathan, the architect of India's Green Revolution, is a geneticist by training and an accomplished agricultural researcher. He was aware of the tremendous potential of biotechnology and genetic engineering. In the past few decades, information technology has emerged as a great force and has changed the way people live and work in advanced countries. Swaminathan wondered that if new ICTs could benefit rich countries, why should they not be harnessed to help poor countries. He convened an international, interdisciplinary dialogue in 1992. The dialogue participants concluded that ICTs could have a major role in promoting sustainable agriculture and rural development in the developing world. However, mere technology cannot do the trick. One needs the wisdom to use the technologies intelligently and innovatively. After all, the technologies of the Industrial Revolution have only exacerbated the divide between the rich and the poor. Swaminathan fully realized that all technologies have this weakness. He was looking for ways to harness the benefits of new ICTs and at the same time, preventing them from further enlarging existing divides. This is a task meant for only a few people and Swaminathan is surely one of the select few.

In order to benefit farm families, the generic information found in the networks, including the Internet, should be locale-specific knowledge that rural women and men can utilize and act on. This was the model adopted for implementation of this project. Professor M. S. Swaminathan often comments, "whatever a poor family can gain benefit from, the rich can also gain benefit; the reverse does not happen". Thus, involvement of the ultra-poor in rural areas (over 300 million in South Asia) in managing the use of ICTs was considered essential for the success of this project.

The project, which started in 1998 in Pondicherry, South India was chosen because it has certain initial advantages, such as an accessible government and reasonable telecommunications infrastructure (urban teledensity of approx. twenty). The level of poverty is high in rural areas, where 21 per cent of resident families have less than US$ 1 per day as family income. The biovillages project, an earlier programme of the Foundation for community asset building based on biological technologies had been fully operational in this region. The ICT project was expected to complement this programme, and derive benefits from the linkages.

This project is supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), Canada. For electronic knowledge delivery to the poor, we have connected ten villages by a hybrid wired and wireless network, consisting of PCs, telephones, VHF duplex radio devices, and email connectivity through dial-up telephone lines that facilitates both voice and data transfer. This has enabled villagers to obtain the information that they need and use this information to make improvements. The bottom up exercise involves local volunteers that gather the information, feed it into an Intranet, and provide access through nodes in different villages. Value addition to raw information, use of the local language (Tamil), multimedia (to facilitate illiterate users), and participation by local people from the beginning are noteworthy features of the project. Most of the operators and volunteers providing primary information are women, thus giving them status and influence. All centres evolved to meet the increasing information demands made by the community.

This project has won two major international awards viz., Motorola Gold Award 1999 and Stockholm Challenge Award 2001 under The Global Village Category. The knowledge centres are situated in panchayat buildings, temples, a noon meal programme centre, and a private house....

Comment

by Ricardo Ramírez and Dan Pellerin

Two statements from this excellent paper capture the essence of its message:

"It is not that we download the information and then look for users...It is a long social process that precedes the introduction of technology and the establishment of the knowledge centre."

"Many ‘telecentre' projects, in our opinion, make this cardinal mistake of putting the technology ahead of people. For us, the people, their context, and their needs come first. Then comes the content that can satisfy those needs. Technology is just an enabler to deliver the content in a cost effective manner."

Common sense indeed, but not that common in the last round of development hype to establish telecentre showcase projects. Putting people's needs at the forefront - rather than computers - requires a confident, visionary team with a community development commitment. This article demonstrates with a vast number of examples the significant contribution that information can make when it responds to people's needs. Some of the highlights merit special mention.

The authors describe the power of the process to overcome caste restrictions: Dalit groups that would otherwise have been excluded from the Village Knowledge Centres gained acceptance, the same applies to menstruating women that tradition would have kept at bay. These accomplishments are perhaps an indication that the centres have hailed some sort of new era in the eyes of the local hierarchy, making it acceptable to change tradition (not to mention and abide with modern Indian law). Experiences in Nepal echo the potential of these new technologies to put caste differences aside.

The importance of placing women in control over these efforts is noteworthy. It echoes the experience by Grameen Telecom in Bangladesh whereby rural cell phones are placed in the hands of women and research shows that this very fact increases access to the communication service by village women (Richardson et al., 2001). The increase in women's status at the village level is bound to have profound positive consequences in other aspects of village life: for example food security research has shown that women's status and level of education are positively correlated with improved nutrition practices in the home (von Braun and Kennedy, 1994).

The authors provide many examples where time-sensitive information - namely prices and weather - improves villager's decisions about when to buy inputs and sell produce, or how to market new products. Weather information helps fisherfolk decide what risks to take at sea and database with services enables villages to access medical and veterinary help. Indeed, experience in other countries shows that most of these services are possible simply by having access to a phone. What is new in this experience is the systematic effort at doing PRAs and surveying local needs and building databases to respond to those needs - hence the value of the computers. Making local information available is just as important as downloading information from elsewhere. In this experience, the local information is made available through a range of other conventional media such as word of mouth, public address systems, community newspapers, and radio. The combination of modern ICTs with existing and proven community media demonstrates that the facilitators of this process are not blinded by the glamour of high-tech -- how refreshing!

Technology-wise, it is pretty simple but the bandwidth of 4,800 baud must be rather irritating. The three new sites on the 11 mbps are pretty straightforward and quite effective without being overly complicated. A radio can be replaced relatively easily and the networking skills required are well within the realm of the regions.

It is not clear how the bandwidth used is paid for at the Internet gateway. The authors talk about the ways the network is being used and the value. How the bandwidth is presently being paid for goes a long way towards determining sustainability in the long run, not to mention the demands that the users place on the system will put strain on the 4800 baud system. Otherwise it sounds like a good network that is focused, uses the local

talent to a large degree, and can grow without requiring a lot of technical outside expertise. Perhaps the ongoing training includes some internetworking from a design and implementation point of view.

For those concerned with sustainability and replication, the authors have some challenging messages. There are important unexpected outcomes such as the women's counseling services that emerged when women sought additional information on vegetable prices, pre and post-natal care, employment opportunities, and micro enterprises. These unexpected outcomes are valuable and would not have appeared in conventional project logical frameworks. Research in other places where broadband connectivity is expanding increasingly shows the need to embrace unexpected outcomes. As the authors highlight the process is dynamic and allows people to dream of new uses.

The sustainability of these experiences needs to address several dimensions. For those concerned with the financial and technological dimensions, it is important to note experience elsewhere that suggests that the village knowledge centres should not be expected to run entirely on a customer-paid-service basis, especially as they provide so many government-related services. In one recent study it was reported that telecentres in Hungary earned 60 per cent of their revenue from government sources, some of which are competitive funds (Proenza, 2002). Government agencies are major financial contributors as the centre enables the gathering and distribution of information that would otherwise be more expensive and less timely to exchange. This brokering role - whereby community needs are matched with relevant information - is noteworthy and the groups have been referred to elsewhere as ‘mediating organizations' (Ramírez, 2001).

For those concerned with the social sustainability, the centres should be understood as an educational process. The e-readiness that they are providing is significant: volunteers are learning on the job, community members are finding a familiar setting with local people that will help them explore the technology, women are gaining skills and status. These benefits are not intangible - though difficult to quantify - and merit continued support from the public sector.

Replication of the experience represents a significant challenge in that the "cookie-cutter" approach for massification is not applicable. The nature of the organization that incubated this experience cannot be ignored as it imprints on the process: the people-first commitment and the attention to local needs before prescribing technology, reflects a community development philosophy. Other organizations seeking to replicate this process need to first do a self-audit on their own principles and orientation. Community ownership and bottom-up planning is central to the accomplishments here described, and few organizations are humble enough - and donors patient enough - to emulate such a process effectively.

NOTE: excerpted with permission from UNCRD.

For the full document online, please click here.

UNCRD ICT site.