Public Access to ICT Pulled Apart – A peak into the research of exploring the impact

[Raymond Hyma]

Until now, measuring the impact of public access to ICT in various thematic sectors such as education, health, employment, civic engagement and cultural preservation has been difficult in the absence of a comprehensive effort to develop an appropriate research approach and assessment tools. The Global Impact Study of Public Access to ICT (or Global Impact Study in short) is a complex and multifaceted project that attempts to tackle such a challenge and take a fresh new look at how we can begin to capture and better understand the impact of public access to ICT offered through venues such as telecentres and libraries. This exciting project, housed under the research pillar at telecentre.org, is the beginning of a process that is very much needed to evaluate where we are in terms of public access interventions and the impact they have been making in the scope of development.

As the Global Impact Study gets underway, a review of previous literature has been an ongoing priority in order to systematically collect and evaluate what we already know in the field of public access to ICT impact evaluation and practices. As a working document, the literature review has evolved and has recently been updated on the project website.

The literature review identified four principle types of evidence under which public access to ICT impact have or have not occurred:

1) venue performance and sustainability: Focusing on the relevance and the financial sustainability of public access ICT venues

2) users: Determining who are taking advantage of access services in terms of age groups, gender and socio-economic status.

3) usage patterns: Examining what people are using ICT to access and for what purposes that information serves.

4) downstream impacts: Evaluating the trickle down effects of the introduction of public access to ICT in communities through a development strategy perspective.

During the development of this phase of the study, it has become clear that the first three types do in fact show some apparent trends across the board: mainly that impact is not consistent across public access to ICT venues. For example, a venue performance and sustainability lens demonstrates that there has been a struggle and variation in achieving financial sustainability, hence limiting the possibility of impact to a smaller window of opportunity or to a smaller group of target beneficiaries. The literature review also highlights that research has been limited in demonstrating downstream impact, or outputs related to development objectives, through the establishment of public access to ICT venues. Although more elusive than the other first three types of evidence, there have been some domains with initial research development in education, governance, employment, institutional capacity, equity, civic engagement, health, culture/language preservation and gender empowerment. The Global Impact Study will in fact attempt to find better evidence of impact on these types of issues.

The observations of this review conclude that most of the work on this topic has focused more on the way public access to ICT venues have been running rather than on the development of hard impact indicators or a set of identified results in a development context. This leads to an ongoing trend in highlighting the potential rather than the proven impact. Of course this means that there continues to be a strong need in the field to work on developing indicators and strengthening the linkages between ICT interventions and development objectives.

Feed your curiosity on some of the preliminary results of the research findings by taking a look at the most recent report here.


If you’re interested in comparing it to the earlier version that outlined the nature of the existing research, you can find it here.

Stay tuned for further developments on this initial collection and analysis of existing work that may give us a glimpse of how telecentres have affected the way people live!