Fuchs R.P. (1997) If you have a lemon, make a lemonade: A guide to the Start-up of African Multiporpose Community Telecentre Pilot Projects,  Ottawa: IDRC.

Online: http://web.idrc.ca/en/ev-8785-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

The article describes the experience of Multipurpose Community Telecentre Pilot Projects, a joint initiative of the International Telecommunications Union, UNESCO, the International Development Research Centre and their national and local partners in Africa.

The author defines telecentre as the fusion of telecommunications, information, multimedia and computing functions to help address a variety of community problems and needs. The article gives some success factors taken from experience around the world:

1. telecentres must respond to the different ways in which people develop new skills and their accompanying values and attitudes along the innovation curve.
2. people don't know what they don't know: taking the Uganda case was clear to the author that none of the people who were collaborating with us there had ever actually seen a telecentre, much less worked in one, moreover The lack of institutional experience with telecentres is also relevant at the local, service delivery level. Therefore people need to be encouraged to become involved in "information seeking behaviour.
3. it is extremely important to understand where the services fit on the "value chain of information". (data à information à knowledge à wisdom)
4. the telecentres that succeed do so, in the long run, because there is a community champion for whom the word failure doesn't exist.
5. the right man for this job is a woman: because they face less expectation pressures.
6. it is important to demonstrate what a telecentre might provide whenever the opportunity arises

Some key elements are:

1. manage an equilibrium in the information "balance of trade" between the local community and the global village.
2. telecentre is a tool for the decentralization of capacity.
3. the African telecentres ought to both build the capacity to create African information and communications products and services at the same time that they condition and "make", or create, local, national and international markets
4. A telecentre should be the very antithesis of the credentialist institution
5. Telecentres represent a public good
6. Use state of the art technologies
7. Promote institution-Community Partnership

The paper goes on describing the first phases of setting up the MCT pilots.

The article concludes stressing the need for training, research, networking of telecentres and awareness building.