Bid to hook rural people to info

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A fisherman in a coastal village wakes up one morning to find ominous clouds looming on the horizon, he turns the switch his battery-run radio on, just to find the batteries down.

He moves around his humble hut impatiently for a while and then conjures all his courage deciding to sail out to the ocean hoping to get back home early before the dark clouds may rain death on him and his peers.

A storm appears earlier than he anticipated, trapping him and his peers in the mid-sea, beckoning their doom as his last wish flashes through his mind — if only he could have instructed his radio to repeat the weather update he had missed in the morning!

Thousands of fishermen who survived Cyclone Sidr or were perished in it, share similar experiences, but little do they know about telecentres, which could make their wish for on-demand weather updates a reality.

Whether it is a weather update or farmers trying to know the retail prices of their crops on the market, whether a patient is trying to get health information or a village student who just passed the higher secondary examinations wants to know about university admission test dates — all these information can be made available to the rural community, in fact which is already being done on a small scale by telecentres across the country.

What if we could provide every villager with access to the telecentres? The idea prompted Bangladesh Telecentre Network (BTN) to prepare the launching of ‘Mission 2011′. BTN is a coalition of organisations led by Development Research Network (D.Net) and other organisations like Bangladesh Radio Network for Rural Communications (BNNRC), Grameen Telecom, Dhaka Ahsania Mission, and Amader Gram among others, who have been nurturing the existing telecentres in the country.

BTN is scheduled to formally launch ‘Mission 2011: Building a Sustainable Information and Knowledge System for the Poor and Marginalized’ today in Bangladesh China Friendship Conference Centre (BCFCC), where Chief Adviser (CA) Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed is expected to inaugurate the programme.

“Mission 2011 is about establishing at least 40,000 telecentres in rural Bangladesh by the 40th anniversary of the country’s independence,” said Dr Ananya Raihan, secretary general of BTN and also the executive director of D.Net.

“These telecentres will be of diverse models, ownerships, technology mix, and outreach targets initiated by grassroots development organisations, social entrepreneurs, the private sector and the government. BTN is a multi-stakeholder coalition of both individuals and institutions for achieving the targets of Mission 2011,” he added.

The concept of telecentres is not new. A telecentre is a public place where people may access and learn how to use computers, the Internet and other technologies that help them gather information and communicate with others.

Telecentres exist in almost every country, although they sometimes go by other names like village knowledge centres, infocentres, information kiosks, etc. Telecentres in Bangladesh also go by different identities like Community Multimedia Centre, Community Information Centre, Rural Knowledge Centre, Pallitathya Kendra, etc.

The limited data available suggests that there are at least 1,60,000 government, community, and entrepreneur run telecentres globally, while in Bangladesh the number is approximately 1,000.

ICT based telecentre movement in Bangladesh was initiated by D.Net. It took the idea of ‘Pallitathya’ and started a research in 2001. D.Net established four Pallitathya Kendras in 2005 on a pilot basis in four remote villages of Nilphamari, Netrakona, Noakhali, and Bagerhat. Currently it has 80 centres all over the country.

They also introduced the concept of ‘mobile ladies’, female information workers with cellphones connected to a help- desk of experts on various livelihood topics, the service is called ‘help line’.

Becoming a ‘mobile lady’, who play a crucial role in delivering information to the rural population, has become a popular way of earning a living for women in remote areas.

A research carried out by D.Net shows that the use of mobile phone technology empowered many women, service providers, and consumers of services; 36 percent of mobile phone users are house wives, 40 percent of the callers are from the age group of 19 to 30 years. The majority of the queries are related to health standing at 46.2 percent, and regarding agriculture standing at 36.3 percent. Other categories of queries include education, human rights issues, non-farm economic activities, awareness related issues, and governance.

While conducting the research, D.Net designed a system of information and knowledge exchange for the poor and identified that digital content regarding livelihood issues in Bangla was a necessity. After four and a half years of content development it came up with ‘Jeeon’, an Information and Knowledge Base (IKB) for the rural community, through which it is trying to minimise the information gap, allowing its research team to include illiterate people as the beneficiaries of the Pallitathya system.

D.Net also introduced the concept of ‘Benefit of Investment’ (BOI) for assessing the benefits accrued by a community from a telecentre in monetary terms, where applicable, in comparison to the investment made in a community-based unit of Pallitathya Kendra.

The combined BOI for the whole Pallitathya experiment currently stands at 1:4.64, meaning for each taka invested in the telecentre system the rural community’s benefit is worth Tk 4.64 in a 15 months period.

Community Information Centre (CIC) model was initiated by Grameen Phone (GP), the largest telecom operator in the country. The first 16 CICs were launched in February 2006 as part of a pilot project in different parts of the country, with four each in Sylhet, Rajshahi and Khulna divisions while two each were set up in Dhaka and Chittagong divisions. Currently GP operates 565 CICs across the country.

The community ownership based CICs are equipped with at least one computer, a printer, a scanner, a web cam, and an Edge enabled modem for accessing the Internet, and are run as franchises of GP. The company has a plan to launch 60,000 additional CICs across the country.

Dhaka Ahsania Mission (DAM) also launched its first community learning centre, locally known as Gonokendra, in 1987, and now there are more than 100 of them across the country, five of which are equipped with ICT.

Grameen Telecom (GTC), a sister concern of Grameen Bank, also launched its unique brand called Village Phone (VP) Programme in 1997. GTC currently has almost 300,000 village phones, all the operators of which are also recipients of Grameen Bank loans.

Apart from these, Amader Gram, Relief International-School Online, Youth Community Multimedia Centre (YCMC), DEN (Digital equity Network), KATALYST, Brac NET, and other BTN members also established their own models of telecentres across the country.

‘Mission 2011′ is a hope, to contribute towards poverty alleviation through the power of ICT crafted for the poor, promoting a knowledge based society for all. But the mission needs contributions from all walks of life. For more information please visit www.mission2011.net.bd.

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