Content & Services

Offering content and services that communities value is critical to the social and financial sustainability of telecentres and telecentre networks. Education, health care, banking, and e-Government are but a few examples.

telecentre.org's social investment program supports the development of new content and services and promotes the documentation of successes and sharing of learning and experiences. Work to date includes:

• Examining social enterprise ideas and models developed by telecentre networks around the world. Some of these are captured on the SustainabilityFirst blog. We plan to release the full set of case studies in early 2009.

• Supporting efforts to develop a range of products and services that telecentre networks can offer to their members. Working with Drishtee, telecentre.org supported business process outsourcing research and implementation in India (download report). In partnership with Grameen Gyan Abhiyan (formerly known as Mission 2007) and Microsoft India, telecentre.org invested in the Mission 2007 Rural Innovation Fund, which supported eight content and service development initiatives.

• Support for social enterprise training for telecentre networks in Latin America, North America, Asia, and Africa. This project, implemented in partnership with NESsT, led to the development of a sustainability toolkit, to be released in October 2008.

telecentre.org is now working with a small group of networks on a pilot project to test social enterprise models that use community telecentres as a distribution channel for content and services. Specifically, we want to understand how to help telecentre networks build robust delivery channels.

This pilot will explore new approaches to social and economic development, combining base-of-the-pyramid business models, social enterprise principles, ICTs for development, and regional-horizontal scaling up. It will also provide a good example of how telecentre networks, NGOs, international development agencies, companies, and social enterprises can collaborate to find new ways to finance development. We will share our experiences and hope to use our learning to support a broader group of networks.

To learn more about telecentre.org's investments in Content & Services, please contact Jacqueline Loh.