Etta F.E. and Parvyn-Wamahiu S. (eds) (2003) ICTs in Africa: The landscape for growing telecentres 2003, in Communication Technologies For Development In Africa: Volume 2 The Experience with Community Telecentres (2003), Ottawa: IDRC

Online: http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-56546-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

The chapter focuses on the situation of information and communication technology in the African continent. It provides a brief overview of TV and radio in Africa, of the significant changes and the nowadays situation of the telecommunication sector and of the Internet spread. It goes on underlining the main difficulties in using ICTs equipment in the continent: electricity lack, equipment costs and taxes, literacy, hindering policies. It goes further delineating telecentre as one of the strategy adopted by national and international organization to achieve the goal of Universal access.

Authors traces back in time the birth of the first telecentre, in Sweden in 1985. They say that the telecentre phenomena is still in discovery, and this is the reason why attempts to classify the currently existing types are still quite unsophisticated. They report the classification of Gomez at all (1999b):

• Basic telecentre, usually located in rural marginalized areas where there is limited access to basic services in general where training of potential users is a popular service in addition to internet access.
• Telecentre franchise, a series of independently owned and managed interconnected telecentres usually supervised by a local organization, which offers technical and on occasion, financial support.
• Civil telecentre, usually the most common, where a public organization such as a university opens up its facilities like computers for use by the public and the telecentre services tend to be an addition to the other day to day activities of the organization.
• Cybercafé, commercial in nature and found in affluent neighborhoods or hotels and in major towns and cities; and
• The multi purpose community centre, one of the newer models recently introduced in a number of countries offering more specialized services such as tele-medicine.

They claim that this classification mixed criteria and is logically difficult to understand, they suggest the criteria classification proposed by Colle and Roman (1999):

• Public/private
• Publicly or privately funded
• Commercial (fee-based)/free
• Urban/rural
• Narrow-focus/multi-purpose
• Independent/networked, grouped
• Community/establishment-based
• Stand alone/attached
• Profit/service
• Thematic/universal

They go on to address the management and financial issue, reporting the stages underlined by Fuchs (1997): the investment stage, the contract phase and the user fee stage, but challenging the evolutionary view.

Authors present a short paragraph where they describe the main issue arose from the literature:

• Sustainability is multidimensional and dependent on more than just the availability of financial resources. Factors commonly associated with sustainability include the operating environment, ownership and management styles, community participation, relevance of services and content.
• Data pictures from telecentres suggest that access is still limited. Factors affecting this issue are: cost, place, language.
• Community ownership, even it is not proven.