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History


A call to focus on people and back-end services

Telecentres first started appearing in Europe and North America in the mid-1980s. Since then, the telecentre movement has grown quickly and spread to almost every corner of the world. There have been no marketing campaigns to make it grow, and no big organization to "manage" its expansion. Instead, the telecentre movement has been fueled by the power of its ideas, values, and relevance — by different people asking the same basic question: "How can my community participate in and benefit from the social and economic opportunities associated with the information age?" The answer: a common meeting place where people can be exposed to the tools, skills, attitudes, and values of information and network technologies. A telecentre.

telecentre.org emerged in the same way — organically and from many different places. People within the movement realized that past investments had focused too narrowly on infrastructure: computers, Internet access, software, electricity. They called for more resources to be dedicated to networks that supported the work of telecentres on the ground. They emphasized the need to build the skills of telecentre managers, to develop more and better back-end services, to connect people and facilitate sharing and collaboration, and to create high-value content and services to offer through telecentres.

A consortium of organizations, each with a long history of supporting the telecentres — Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Microsoft, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) — responded to the movement's call and began the process of creating a global telecentre support network: telecentre.org.

Read Little Engines That Did: case histories from the global telecentre movement, to learn more about telecentre pioneers' experiences and learning. To learn more about how telecentres have evolved and contribute to social and economic development, read our e-book: From the Ground Up: the evolution of the telecentre movement.

Over three years of consultations and research

From 2002 to 2005, IDRC, UNESCO, IICD, and Microsoft convened meetings, workshops, and consultations, which were attended by over 700 grassroots telecentre leaders. They also conducted extensive research into both telecentre needs and the state of the telecentre movement. They learned that many key pieces of the "telecentre ecosystem" are missing or weak:

  • People who manage or work in telecentres often feel isolated. As social entrepreneurs, they want to connect with others to share ideas, find solutions, and develop their skills.

  • There are large numbers of local telecentres, but few organizations that provide the back-end business or technical support services that needed for them to succeed.

  • We lack an efficient "social supply chain" to provide telecentres with the hardware, software, and other products needed to operate successfully.

  • We need more organizations dedicated to developing services and content that telecentres can offer to people in the communities they serve.

telecentre.org was designed to fill these gaps — to improve telecentre capacity and sustainability locally while at the same time strengthening the global telecentre ecosystem. The underlying approach: invest in networks and back-end service providers in order to develop a richer ecosystem where a diversity of interconnected players help each other succeed. Read our business plan for a more in-depth explanation.

Starting up — telecentre.org's first year

telecentre.org was officially launched in November 2005 at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis. The launch was accompanied by the first Telcentre Leaders Forum (listen to podcast of launch ceremony, read best blogs, download video collage of forum). Over the first year, our support team:

  • Encouraged networks, NGOs, investors, and social entrepreneurs to get involved, grow the movment, and form partnerships through telecentre.org.

  • Worked in partnership with TakingITGlobal to launch the telecentre.org web site and create a global online community of telecentre activists. TIG led a multi-lingual editorial and outreach team who wrote articles, highlighted new resources and trends, and promoted participation. They then trained and supported a new team of regionally based web editors (Community Content Facilitators), and transferred the community facilitation role to telecentre.org partner networks throughout the world.

  • Sponsored, supported, and facilitated events to bring together grassroots leaders, building networks and connections within and between countries. See videos from the Africa Telecentre Leader's Forum in Benin and the Middle East-North Africa Telecentre Stakeholders Workshop in Egypt. Both of these events were held in December 2006 and show how much telecentre.org accomplished since its launch in Tunis.

By the end of the first year, networks in 10 countries joined telcentre.org. And, with these networks connected to each other, people started getting excited about working together and coming up with new ideas and ways to share experiences and grow stronger together.

The Telecentre Times, a newspaper for telecentre leaders is a great example of this. The Telecentre Times sprung from a late-night talk in Tunis between representatives from UgaBYTES (Uganda), D.Net (Bangladesh), and Sarvodaya (Sri Lanka). This happened because telecentre.org brought them together and they struck up a friendship. It was an informal discussion that led to a concrete output.

telecentre.org today

Today we are a growing, dynamic group of telecentre networks and supporters (see list of partners who make up telecentre.org). The content of the telecentre.org website is now managed by a team of Community Content Facilitators based in partner organizations throughout the world:

These organizations have committed to creating a culture of knowledge-sharing. They inform and connect telecentre practitioners, networks, and supporters by animating their communities and producing localized, multi-lingual content. They also work together to strengthen the global movement — encouraging collaboration and making sure that news, innovation, and ideas flow within and across regions.