Three models, one challenge

Around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, February 4+5, 2007: Malaysia has over 1000 telecentres. Most of these have been set up with financing from the Ministry of Water, Energy and Communications. While in Malaysia last week, I had a chance to visit three of of these centres in the rural areas around Kuala Lumpur, each of which operated on a different model.

The first centre I visited was part of the Kedai.com program (‘kedai’ means shop).  Located in a rural planned community / palm plantation the centre was run by a local tuck shop owner who had built a computer lab onto the side of his shop. The centre offered a mix of basic cybercafe services (Internet access, desktop publishing, copying) along with extensive training courses (mostly Office apps and Internet browsing). The young people I met in the centre seemed most motivated by MySpace and Friendster, which offered a good channel to socialize with people from outside the village. The centre is also busy during the time when the government publishes exam results online.

According to the shop owner, business has grown over the three years that he has been operating the centre. He pulls in about $25/day in revenue just from access, for which he charges 75¢/hour. He also charges $80 dollars for each month long training session. These sessions typically have about 10 people in them each month. He says that he makes a small profit once he pays for his training and other costs, but worries that the centre will no longer be profitable after the government maintenance and bandwidth subsidies end next year.

The next centre I visited was in one of Malaysia’s 600 rural libraries, almost all of which have been connected to the Internet. I had a wonderful conversation with the woman running the centre who kept saying: “I love to teach”. And so she did. The centre offered extensive digital skills training, most of it targeted at local youth and housewives. There is so much demand for training in this village that she wants to expand to offer courses on multimedia, but she doesn’t have the skills or software to do this herself. The three computers in the centre are available for Internet access when not being used for training, although this didn’t seem to be a big use. There were no services offered above and beyond training and access. The only revenue source other than government funding was a $3/one time membership fee.

The final centre that I visited was a Pusa Internet Desa, part of a program to build out telecentres on the same premises as post offices. This was the newest and largest of the centres (nine computers). Like the other two, it had incredibly strong infrastructure, training programs and management. The centre was also a part of the government’s community knowledge centre program, which aims to help centres add more value added services. However, it doesn’t seem these services have emerged yet.

It’s worth noting: the Pusa Internet Desa had the most ambitious and creative of the managers I met. When I asked what she saw in the future: “I really want my own building with two floors. We would have an access centre on the first floor and a training centre on the second floor.” As the centre is located in a small town that housed a teacher’s college, demand for her services is quite high. The centres probably could do well with the expanded approach she envisions, and might even become a self sustaining social enterprise.

Across all three of these centres, I saw exemplary rural Internet infrastructure and digital skills programming. This is a great accomplishment, and in many ways puts Malaysia ahead of other countries in terms of rural access. However, as the KTAK Minister noted in his eAsia speech, all of this great infrastructure is very much under utilized. After many millions of dollars, the question remains: telecentres for what?

The good news is that the Ministry behind these programs wants to increase the development impact of these centres by focusing on value added content and services. The community knowledge centre pilot program mentioned above is an indication that they are making efforts in this direction, but the content and services are not there yet. It is likely this process could be accelerated if they were to create a genuinely grassroots telecentre network that could capture and share innovative ideas from the managers who actually running the centres.

Partnership academy

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, February 2007: While the mainstage at last week’s Asian Telecentre Forum was interesting, there was also a great deal going on in the hallways and hotel rooms. Of particular note was collaboration amongst EUTA, the Philippines CECNet and others on the ‘world telecentre academy’ initiative. The idea behind the academy is to create an alliance of organizations working in the field of telcentre manager training. The alliance will provide a platform to share curriculum and develop a common quality seal amongst these programs.

While this effort is interesting in its own right, it is even more notable because it demonstrates how sophisticated telecentre networks around the world are becoming. The players involved in the telecentre academy initiative understand that they can move farther and faster with their telecentre manager training programs if they work together. They also know that a lightweight, flexible global alliance can lend alot of credibility to the capacity building work they do at a national level. It seems the spirit of (peer to peer) networking is really growing in the telecentre movement.

PS. Don’t surprised to see significant developments from this alliance over the coming year. There is a reat deal of promise here.

Telecentre times, two

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, February 7, 2007: A quick note to say: a new magazine on telecentre issues was announced last week at eAsia. This magazine will offer analytical articles and case studies from telecentre practitioners around the world. The magazine is a partnership between CSDMS and telecentre.org. The first issue will come out in August.

The magazine is envisioned as a complement to the grassroots-driven Telecentre Times initiative, which focuses practical advice for telecentre managers and has shorter articles. Key members of the Telecentre Times community will be invited to be on the editorial board of the magazine.

Know hope, and other scribbles

I always feel welcomed by a city with good graffiti. And so it was that I felt very much at home as I explored Tel Aviv today. Particularly powerful was this slogan:

… which appeared a number of places in the centre of the city. I kept looking. And shooting. And saying. “Know hope”.

There were also a number of places where I found this slogan hastily and passionately splashed on a wall:

Based on accompanying text in some places, this was about neither speech nor beer. It was about love. As good thing to celebrate with a spray can.

Moving to the next level …

Hong Kong / Kuala Lumpur / Singapore, February 2007: With a week in East Asia behind me, a theme is settling int: moving telecentres to the next level. It was a week where almost every conversation was about building on existing telecentres … and not about building new telecentres.

When I think back, the opening eAsia speech by Malaysian Water, Energy and Communications Minister Dr. Lim Keng Yaik played a key role in focusing these conversations. Lim’s ministry has helped to build almost 1000 telecentres over the past few years. Instead of trumpeting this as a victory, he says that Malaysia’s telecentres haven’t yet had the impact they had hoped for, and that infrastructure was not enough. Lim spoke of a next wave of effort by his Ministry will be to encourage the growth of value added services and content that make these centres into a real development asset (and also help with sustainability).

While the need to move beyond infrastructure and into services is not a new idea, you rarely hear Ministers making passionate, almost activist speeches on the topic. This put wind in the sails of other eAsia presenters: critics of Nepali government telecentres; social entreprenuers from Grameen Phone; telecentre.org partners working on the telecentre academy concept. All used the fuel provided by the opening speech to get creative about what telecentres can look like when we get beyond the access conversation.

This theme was not only at the conference. It was also central to my conversations with Malaysian telecentre managers during field visits and in meetings with Intel, Microsoft and senior Malaysian bureaucrats. More on all this as I catch up on my blogs in coming days.