Whyte A. (2000) Assessing Community Telecentres,
Ottawa, IDRC
This book forms part of a wider IDRC's Acacia
Initiative. Acacia's program of research, experimentation, demonstration, and
action supports the efforts of national governments to promote universal access
to ICTs by building African capacities and bringing connectivity to poor
communities through telephone, fax, and the Internet. Its central hypothesis is
that connectivity and access to ICT-based tools and knowledge can enable
communities to solve their own development problems and begin to close the
information and development gap.
The book concentrates on telephone, fax, email,
Internet; telemedicine, distance education, news distribution, telecommuting:
these are some of the services offered by the community telecentre. It asks the
following questions:
-
Do telecentres truly respond to the
communication and information needs of the communities they are intended to
serve?
-
What impact do they have on social equity
and economic development?
-
This is seen as an increasingly important
issue as community telecentres become more commonplace across Africa and in
other developing regions of the world In view of this, this guidebook will:
-
Assist researchers as they assess and
evaluate the role and impact of community telecentres.
-
It provides an introduction to some of the
key research issues, a framework for telecentre evaluation, and an impetus
for research teams to share ideas, instruments, and methods.
In particular, the book focuses on:
-
The Telecentre evaluation plan.
This involves identifying research
questions, evaluating the design of questionnaires and developing an
evaluation framework
-
Indicators in Telecentre studies.
This involves developing indicators for
performance, sustainability and information content
-
Issues in sampling and surveying.
Guiding principles for data collection
-
Matching research methods to data needs.
Including: performance reports; questionnaires; projective techniques etc.
-
Data analysis and reporting
(source: www.eldis.org)