Since the launch of e-Seva in the Indian State of Andhra Pradesh in 2001, governments and charity organisations have been building telecentres the world over. Rural communities, for which access to government services had been out of reach for so long, finally joined the information age.
Now new technologies are emerging and the landscape is changing. One of them is the self-service kiosk, commonly available in urban areas in advanced countries. However, Bruno Vun, Director of IT Advancement Unit of the Malaysian state of Sabah, does not believe in self-service kiosks for rural service provision. “Although they save costs, are always available and easy to standardise, the lack of reliability and flexibility often causes frustration and anxiety among users, who might eventually abandon the service altogether,” he says.
Telecentres, on the other hand, are able to customise the services handled by humans, and many of them can be turned into fully-fledged service centres for the particular village, which saves local people time and travel costs.
GOING CELLULAR
The limitations oftelecentres are that they are fixed and location dependant. However Vun says mobile phones provide an interesting alternative. In Malaysia, mobile phone penetration rate is about 70 per cent, which opens up many possibilities for government and businesses to deliver timely and more customised services.
Florencio Ceballos is the Manager of Programmes at Telecentre.org, a global community of individuals and organisations committed to the use of telecentres for social development. “In a relatively short period of time, the mobile phone has totally changed the access landscape, forcing us to re-define the digital divide.”
Ceballos believes that the mobile revolution presents both a challenge and an opportunity to the telecentre movement. A challenge because many basic services, such as email, internet access and information dissemination can now be done through mobile phones. While mobile phones are a good way to communicate and exchange information, only a few niche services can be accessed via mobile phones.
“Once mobile phones move on to the next generation with more sophisticated services, the ubiquity of handsets represents a great opportunity to expand government’s outreach capacities,” Ceballos says. Riding that trend, the IT Advancement unit hopes to put more emphasis on making government services available via the mobile phone. “The backend remains the same, but we need to understand what the best interface should be,” Vun notes. “The idea is that each individual can become a service centre of sorts,” Vun says. But radical thinking is needed on how this can be best approached.
Ceballos says that the worry that mobile phones will sideline traditional ICT is baseless. The means should not matter as long as they help achieve the social objective, he argues. Besides, he adds: “Mobile phones are also information technology-based, are they not?”
Ceballos also believes that a clear synergy between mobile phones and telecentres exists, as the former is ‘ubiquitous but not powerful’, the latter is ‘powerful but not ubiquitous’. “In many cases, the telecentre will be a hub to gather and distribute local information through other means, like mobiles,” he says, adding that in some cases local radios will be used.
COMMUNITY RADIO
Radios, deployed in the 1980s and 1990s, are still common in many parts of Asia where farmers are more concerned about information on the price of their agricultural produce rather than sophisticated interactive services.
In Africa, where the stark challenge of the digital divide prevails, community radios are growing much more rapidly. “Community radios play an irreplaceable role in the heart of rural communities,” says Avis Momeni, Secretary General of Protégé GV, a non-government organisation operating in the central African nation of Cameroon. “They are the local media that take in account the preoccupation of local populations directly.”
Momeni notes that oftennational programmes and services take the ‘one size fit all’ approach and fail to understand local needs. He says although ICTs are more powerful than community radios and could relegate radios in the future, at present these technologies are not readily accessible, and deploying the necessary infrastructure has proven difficult.
POLITICS, POLITICS
In addition to engaging the different government departments which offer rural services from the beginning, Vun says the relationship with these departments is better managed when they are credited for their services. Vun is also worried about the influence of politics in delivering rural services.
Referring to a recent comment from a Malaysian politician who wants all digital inclusion projects in the country to be completed by 2010, he says it is a pity that many politicians want to provide rural services just for the sake of it. Vun uses the Schoolnet project as an example. The initiative aims to equip schools in Malaysia with advanced ICT access. However, in some cases in Sabah, when the vendor delivers the computers, they discover that the school has no electricity supply. Then at extra cost a generator is supplied to the school, but without diesel. The result is that the PCs and generator lie idle because the school has no budget to buy diesel.
EFFECTIVELY LOCAL
The effectiveness of rural service provision is difficult to measure. However Vun points out that the number of users using the service is a good effectiveness indicator. To ensure effectiveness, a service must be delivered according to what the people want rather than what the department is providing, he says.
“The government should communicate with, and deliver services to, rural communities through devolved services in each of the smallest administrative districts,” Momeni says. “Different governments offer different rural services, but programmes often fail because of a lack of resources and understanding on the ground.”
A vast state with a relatively small population, 60 per cent of which rural, Sabah’s rural communities are scattered and traditional infrastructure such as roads, water and electricity has not yet arrived for all. Vun believes that the key to make a difference is for the service providers to practice what is preached.
“The most accurate way to understand the needs of people in rural areas is to go to the countryside and talk to them - even live with them for a while,” Vun says. “Then, and only then, can government understand the real needs of rural communities.”
Through his extensive workin rural areas, Vun says the principle of ‘one size doesn’t fit all’ that has been widely accepted in many other areas, suits this context as well. “Hence, we cannot afford to simply ‘roll out’ a service just because it has proved successful in one particular kampung (village),” he says.
“The same programme might not see the same results in a neighbouring kampung, let alone one that is far away.” Sabah’s telecentre programmes, called e-Desa, is equipped with computers, cameras, scanners, printers and internet access infrastructure. The management of day-today operations, however, is left to the locals. “We can show them the capabilities of the tools given to them. But how creatively they use these tools for their own benefit is very much up to them,” Vun notes.
Momeni would agree. He concludes: “Rural services can only be useful when they take in account of the cultural identity, socioeconomic and environmental issues of the local community.”
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Jianggan Li
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 23.06.2009
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