Partnerships

Delhi, India

Spending a day with Chetan Sharma was the perfect, passionate bookend to my week in India.

There is much I could say about Chetan. He runs a 3000 person outsourcing company called Datamation that gives shares to its employees. He and has wife Sarita lead a small foundation that takes a holistic approach to empowering women in poor communities, with telecentres blended into this approach. He never sleeps. He is alot of fun.

All of this is interesting, but not as interesting as Chetan’s approach to partnership.

I saw how Chetan plays with partnership first hand as we tumbled out of the car onto a busy northeastern Delhi roadside. We were standing in front of the Madrasa Babul Uloom, a Koranic school and orphanage. As we climbed slowly up the steps behind the school, I saw that we’d also arrived at a Datamation Foundation telecentre and sewing school.

Datamation is without doubt a secular organization. But it is also an organization that is committed to reaching across boundaries to create opportunity for women, including women in this poor Muslim neighbourhood. Making good on that commitment means taking partnership seriously. In this case, Datamation has partnered up with Maulana Zafaruddin Ahmad, the progressive local leader who runs this school, to create a space for their work.

As we walk into the telecentre, we see about a dozen women paired up in twos or threes, working on various projects. Following a self paced Flash course on Aids. Playing with PowerPoint. Making invitations for their weddings. Smiling. Laughing. Learning. All of this is a part of a computer skills development course they have signed up for at the telecentre. They’ve each paid 50 rupees (about $US1) to take the course for a month. Separate courses are offered for men in the evenings, at 200 rupees per month.

As we watch, we get a chance to talk with Guddi – the young volunteer who started out at the telecentre as a student and is now teaching the class. Between translations, Chetan asks her: how has your life changed since you started learning computers here? She giggles, and looks away. Then she looks back at us: “I used to be so shy. Now, my mother says I am a chatterbox. I never shut up.” Watching her lead and mentor the other women in the room, it is almost impossible to imagine that she was ever shy.

Clearly, this place is built on the principle that partnership flows both ways. The school is providing space, and helping the community it serves. Guddi is gaining confidence and voice, and then helping others to do the same. Similar partnerships are embedded throughout Datamation’s work. Partnerships with Open Knowledge Network, HP, Microsoft and many others thread into this – testing software, sharing local language content, helping to create livelihoods for the poor. None of these partnerships are based on pure charity. They all go both ways, and they are all grounded in meeting real needs for everyone around the table.

Driving out of East Delhi, I wanted to ask – and write – about each of these partnerships in detail. But time was running short, and the conversation started to fragment. I sat back and accepted that the inspiring time I’d spent at the Datamation centre was enough for now. There is still much time to learn from this passionate approach to partnership … and to see how it connects into the work ahead.

Becoming many, becoming one

Delhi, India

While I only had a too-short 90 minutes to meet with One World South Asia, it’s worth reflecting on this time quickly.

I’ve known and followed One World since it started up outside of Oxford, UK in the mid-1990s. In that time, it’s grown from a small idea into a large international initiative … and now finally seems to be shaking out into something that looks much more like a network. Meeting with OW South Asia, this is clearly a group that is driven from India, and not from London.

As in Africa, the Open Knowledge Network project of OW South Asia is working with the same sort of people that telecentre.org wants to support. Datamation. MSSRF. TARAHaat. And so on. Of course, the focus is different – content rather than support and training. But there is a common audience and, I think, a common cause.

We’ll get a chance to learn more about OW South Asia as we proceed with the recently funded Mission 2007 partnership case study, and as we look at ways to work more broadly with Indian telecentre leaders on issues like training. I am looking forward to it.

Finding an edge

Delhi, India

Ever since Accra, I’ve been looking for an edge … an edge somewhere between the two poles of the telecentre world.

At one end of the spectrum are simple entrepreneurial models for spreading and sharing access to communications. The Indian public call office (PCO). The Grameen village phone. The woman on the streets of Accra (or anywhere) who simply shares her cell phone, for a small per minute mark up. At the other are public good initiatives aimed directly at learning, economic opportunity and community empowerment. The MSSRF knowledge centres. Community multimedia centres. Community-based learning centres.

Both ends of the spectrum offer a great deal in their own right. However, my sense is that something interesting can happen when one actively combines – or finds the edge between – both models. Last week in Delhi, I found a number of people playing with this edge.

The first was Rakesh Khanna of TARAHaat, a group helps village entrepreneurs set up a ‘franchised business-cum-community centre’ called a TARAkendra. Housed within Development Alternatives, an NGO with a long history in social enterprise, TARAHaat is focused on both creating livelihoods and bringing info access to the village level. They provide training, systems and content to help entrepreneurs set up TARAKendra kiosks. The TARAkendra operator in turn offers skills development and electronic services to the people in their village for a small charge, saving people time and money they would have spent getting them from far away towns and cities. Over time, this is meant to create a sustainable small business for the entrepreneur and better access to information and opportunity for the local community.

Satyan Mishra, CEO of Drishtee Dot Com Ltd, is taking a similar approach. Drishtee has provided kiosk packages, training and support to over 300 small scale entrepreneurs in six districts across India. The Drishtee outlets provide skills training and e-mail access. They also are strong – and aim to get stronger – at providing electronic access to district government (e.g. driver’s licenses and public grievances) and to financial institutions (e.g. insurance providers).

Visiting a village about 1.5 hours from Delhi, I had a chance to see one of the Drishtee kiosks in action. I listened in on a basic English class, with about a dozen young students doing exercises in with the teacher. As the class went on the background, I met briefly with the kiosk owner. He told me that he was doing well with services like taking and processing digital photos for passports, and that he hoped to make a good living from it. He also told me that he felt that he was doing something good, something that was recognized in his community.

Looking at both TARAHaat and Drishtee, I was happy to have found others who want to play with the social enterprise edge of the telecentre world. Yet, I left my meetings with both men filled with more questions than answers. How do we make sure that entrepreneurial experiments stay rooted in, and interconnected to, the development side of things? When and where do entrepreneurial telecentre models make sense instead of purely public good models, and how and when do you mix them? And, most interestingly, the question called out my Microsoft India colleague Ankhi Das: can we use these kiosks to help new money and economic opportunity flow into the village, or are we just offering services that help money flow out?

My sense is that many people are already trying to grapple with these questions as they relate to telecentres… and that others, like the fair trade and coop movements, have grappled with them before. Maybe one of the useful things telecentre.org can do is help focus this reflection, bringing together people with a common commitment to finding the social enterprise edge in local technology. I don’t know what would come of this, but having met folks like Satyan and Rakesh, I know that it would be something interesting.

Temple telecentre

Gampaha, Sri Lanka

I also had a chance to visit an IDRC-funded Sarvodaya wireless telecentre (or telehut) project north of Colombo. This one was much more rural, a small village heading into the hills and with little infrastructure near by. The only public buildings in the village are the school, the library and the temple. Sarvodaya has decided to put computers in all three, and to connect them with wifi.

Schools and libraries are common places to find telecentres. Bhuddist temples are not. But, as Manju for ICTA explained to me when we met in Ottawa a while back, there is a long tradition in Sri Lanka of using temples as places of learning. And, probably more important, the local priest is really keen about computers.

The set up includes a main Internet receiver tower at the temple, which then rebroadcasts to the school and the library. Both the temple and school have desktop computers. The library will have a laptop that is taken away every night for security reasons.

In classic IDRC action research style, all of this will be studied from a community impact, gender and technical perspective to see what will happen. It’s very early days (we actually delivered the computer to the school while there) … but it will be interesting to see where this goes as it evolves.

Multi, multi, multi purpose

Kalutara, Sri Lanka

Yesterday, I had the chance to visit one of Sarvodaya’s district office telecentre in Kalutara, about an hour south of Colombo. As the young woman who ran the training program at the centre explain, the core services are really focused on the learning centre model. They offer computer training courses to local youth and their families on everything from basic keyboarding to office applications to digital animation.

Also, the Kalutara centre serves as a hub for eight smaller village information centres (VICs). Run by local volunteer youth, the VICs are basically village information boards. The youth come to the telecentre to clip newspaper articles, print out information from the net or make up posters to post back on their village board. It’s a low tech way to get useful, targeted info back to the village … and a high touch way to get these youth comfortable in the telecentre.

It’s worth noting that, while the telecentre still seemed to be building up steam in terms of clientle, there was a buzz of action all around us. That’s because Kalutara district office also houses about half a dozen other activities. As we walked around, we found a microcredit bank that provides a backend for village lending societies, a community kitchen … and a brick factory. Right behind the back wall of the telecentre, a small group of men were making cement bricks and wood boards for tsunami reconstruction houses. The Sarvodaya centres, it seems, are a hub for many things.

Looking around the globe, this integrated or embedded model of telecentres seems to be one of the good ones. Embedding not only means that there is a place to put the telecentre, but more importantly that the ambient buzz of other activities gradually drives clients to the telecentre. In many cases, it also means that the telecentre slowly blends into the other community services an organization is offering, becoming a part of employment counseling, microcredit, whatever.

Early on, it is tough to tell what this Sarvodaya centre – and the other 30-some centres like it – will become. Maybe it will simply stay focused on computer training and feeding the VICs, which are certainly useful. But, with the community buzz all around, it may just become something bigger.

e-Land

Colombo, Sri Lanka

This trip represented my second meeting with Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA). I’d met the Agency’s energetic leader, Manju Hathotuwa in Ottawa about six weeks ago. Now it was time to meet the whole team.

As outlined in the presentation by program manager Reshan  Dewapura, ICTA and it’s e-Sri Lanka program, are tackling a set of challenges that other countries have taken a run at before – building a backbone that reaches small and isolated areas, developing demand and applications in these areas, e-enabling (and transforming) government. Which for them, is a good thing, as they seem pretty committed to learning from the mistakes of others.

You can certainly see this when you look at the design of their telecentre – or NanaSala – program. While it is barely out of the gate, it already builds in lessons from projects elsewhere. Many of the telecentres will be embedded within existing community organizations, like temples, schools and libraries (lesson: telecentres in existing community orgs usually survive). Others will be run by local entrepreneurs (lesson: you need to think about financial sustainability up front). At the core, the folks running these front line centres will be held up by ’support organizations’ – essentially hubs that help the spokes (lesson: front line telecentres are more likely to succeed when backstopped by a hub or support network).

Of course, there are still lots of questions. Where is the local language content going to come from (beyond government services)? Can you really build demand for an entrepreneurial model from scratch in a place that’s never seen a computer before (some people have, others haven’t)? How well will the Nanasala’s connect into what’s happening with community telecentres run by groups like Sarvodaya? And, most importantly of all, does it look as neat on the ground as it does in a PowerPoint (it never does ).

Nobody has the answer to these questions right now. But Manju and his team have a strength that may well help them come up with the answers in the future – the willingness to launch early, listen hard and evolve. The NanaSala (formerly VGK) model had shifted a lot since I first heard it six weeks ago, partly as a result of conversations with outside folks. If they can keep evolving in this manner, it’s likely ICTA will come up with some good answers – whatever those answers happen to be.

Shramadana

Colombo, Sri Lanka

For Savodaya, networks run deep – deep between the hearts and souls of the villages where they have worked for 47 years.

Working in all parts of the country, Sarvodaya is Sri Lanka’s largest and oldest NGO. One of their biggest tasks in the past five months has, of course, been responding to the impact of the devastating tsunami that hit Sri Lanka on December 26, 2004. Initially, they provided relief – food, temporary shelter, solace. Now they are helping to rebuild homes, lives and local economies all around Sri Lanka’s coast.

When IDRC colleagues and I visited Sarvodaya’s head office south of Colombo, we toured a room with posters documenting this post-tsunami work. Each handmade poster illustrated a particular tsunami response program, or the nature of the damage in regions with Sarvodaya district offices. There was also a map. A very interesting map …

… the map had red pins for district offices in tsunami-affected areas, and green pins for offices located in Sri Lanka’s interior. Thick, coloured string connected pairs of green and red pins, representing the fact that offices were paired up immediately after the crisis. People from the interior offices quickly sprung into action to help people in the coast areas they were twinned with. And, now, they continue with rehabilitation efforts.

What stuck me in this was that, without the explanation we’d received, the pins and string could easily be mistaken for a network map. Backbones. Exchanges. Hubs. And, in a way, that’s exactly what it was. It was a map of the deep networks that Sarvodaya has been able to build within and between villages in Sri Lanka, even through a time of war. These networks run deep, and respond fast.

Like any good network, the map was built on one of Sarvodaya’s key principles –  shramadana, or sharing energy. Of course, I’d never heard the Sinhalese word shramadana before. But I’ve known for a long time that it’s exactly the thing that makes networks real … and impactful. People connecting to people – playing, helping, learning together. That’s what provides the fuel for most effective networks.

Out on the road, with the aim of building networks amongst telecentre operators, it was a real gift to learn this new word. For this I am very grateful to Sarvodaya.

Hope

On the Galle Road, Sri Lanka

It’s hard to make a trip down the Galle Road south of Colombo without taking some time to reflect on the devastating tsunami damage. Seeing post-tsunami pictures last December made one feel sad, for certain. But, like all media inspired sadness, it was a feeling that lacked depth. Driving by, and walking in, the rubble that remains all along the Galle Road brought depth.

With the depth came a ghostly kind of sadness. Walking around, it felt like – I imagine – a walk through Pompeii after the lava hardened or Nagasaki when people’s images were burned into the pavement. Empty, still, devastating. Looking at the remains of a kitchen counter, with cooking implements and cleaning bottles still in the lower cupboards, I could imagine someone standing there as the waves hit. It could see and feel the ghosts.

Yes, looking up and around the damage, there was also hope to be had. Across the road from the remains of the kitchen, half a dozen boys were playing volley ball (right beside a closed-on-Sunday ICTA telecentre, strangely enough). Despite the slow pace of rebuilding, there were still laughing, playing, chatting. As we talked to them, it was clear that they still felt and honoured the ghosts, but that they didn’t think this should get in the way of celebrating life.

Evolution

Pondicherry, India

For many, the word ‘telecentre’ still evokes an image of simple, straightforward technology access in rural communities. But, since first popping up 20 years ago, the telecentre idea has evolved – dramatically. Attending the ribbon cutting for a new MSSRF village knowledge hub in Pondicherry, India earlier this week, I was reminded of just how far this evolution has come.

It is important to know that the MSSRF is not a computing organization. In fact, they are rooted in agricultural development, with an early (and continued) focus on helping the rural poor develop better farming techniques. The new knowledge hub sits within this context – literally. MSSRF had first built a small, community-driven experimental farm in Pondicherry called a biovillage. It’s a place where people from the local community are involved in agricultural experiments and training. The new knowledge hub sits smack in the middle of this biovillage, which grounds its work in the real needs of village people – local information, agricultural information, community development.

Yet it is not just the location – and the idea of embedding technology access into a non-techie org – that are interesting. It is also the model. Bank in 1998, the village knowledge centres were really amongst the first telecentre projects to say: “this is about local knowledge and information, by the people who live here, for the people who live here.” So, that’s who runs the knowledge hub – five local villagers who have been involved with MSSRF for a while. Three of them are women, two are men. They use the hub both as a village access point and as a feeder point generate local information resources for smaller knowledge centres. The result is people driven, relevant information for local communities – weather for fisherman, agricultural information, local news.

And then of course there is the ’stuff’ that makes up a telecentre – the technology bits that people often think of first rather than last. Certainly, the MSSRF centres have way more ’stuff’ than the old image of a telecentre would imply. This one had about eight workstations, a server, HAM radio, battery back ups, printers … and, of course, a chalk board for local news. Other MSSRF centres, especially on the coast, also have loudspeakers to broadcast news to a village.

The new knowledge hub also has an FM radio station, making it possible to get local information out widely to people who would never step into a telecentre. While the radio / telecentre combo is becoming quite popular in Africa, it is a novelty here in India as it is impossible to get a community radio license. MSSRF – and their partners from the Open Knowledge Network – have piggybacked on a special licensed own by a local radio station. With the first transmission during the opening, there was intense excitement, with a small crowd of local women listening on a battery powered radio in the back room. Another link to the village, another way to connect people to information they want and need.

On the car ride back from the opening, my colleague Genevieve asked: what is a telecentre? Is a village knowledge centre a telecentre? Arun from MSSRF’s immediate response was “No! It is much more” I pushed back: my idea of what a telecentre is includes all the things you find at MSSRF. After a bit of discussion, Arun came back with: “Yes, the village knowledge centre is an evolved telecentre. The idea has evolved.”

It was this conversation with Arun that how much the telecentre idea has evolved, and how much we need to talk about that evolution to understand where the telecentre movement is going. And, of course, it also inspired this post. Thanks, Arun.

Stepping into a movement

Kovalam, Tamil Nadu, India

Kovalam is a small village on the coast of Tamil Nadu, India. Like most of the neighbouring villages, the people of Kovalam have spent the last five months rebuilding from the devastating Tsunami that hit in December 2004. They have repaired houses that were damaged, built boats to replace the ones that were washed away … and created a telecentre.

More precisely, the people of Kovalam have built a village knowledge centre – an evolved telecentre that is focused on local languages, empowering women and sharing information that is targeted specifically at the needs of local villagers. Like old-school telecentres, they have computers and computer training. But they also have language training, local newspapers, a chalkboard out front with village news … and a busy clientele of kids and young adults clambering to use the computers. All of this is just a few buildings up the street from the beachside boat works where they are still rebuilding the fishing skiffs that were swept away by the massive December tide.

I was taken to Kovalam by Subbiah Arunachalam from the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), the organization that pioneered the village knowledge centre model back in 1998. MSSRF helped create the Kovalam centre within a few months of the tsunami. They did this with financial backing from the Tata Relief Committee, Tata being the largest conglomerate in India.

Going to Kovalam, I was struck not just by the power of the MSSRF knowledge centre model (I’ll post tomorrow on this), but also by the speed with which this centre, and similar centres in many other seaside villages, was established. For me, this really demonstrated how far India has come with the idea of village information centres. MSSRF and similar organizations now have enough experience that they can quickly throw up a knowledge centre and make it work – not just technically, but also as a social hub and a relevant local information source.

Standing there I couldn’t help but reflect on the ambitious plans that Swaminathan and almost 100 other organizations called out last year under the banner National Alliance for Mission 2007. This coalition of NGOs, businesses and government have targeted the ambitious goal of 600,000 knowledge centres and training 1,000,000 knowledge workers by the 60th anniversary of India’s independence in August 2007. From afar, this might seem like a pipe dream. Standing in Kovalam, listening to the ocean and watching the boats get built, it seems real. It seems possible.

Of course, the numbers are not what matters. It’s the fact that many organizations in India now know how to do this stuff well, and keep learning to do it better. This experience, combined with the backing of folks like the Tata Relief Committee and the Government of India, have the potential to be a magic combination. Professor Swaminathan calls this the in every village a knowledge centre movement. It is a movement indeed.