The 3rd EATLF key outcomes and experiences

Created By: Esther on 8-Jun-2007 12:00 AM

The East African Telecentre leaders Forum – EATLF, a biannual gathering of telecentre practitioner in the East African sub region is an initiative of UgaBYTES in collaboration with telecentre.org, which is funded by IDRC, Microsoft, and SDC. The third of its kind has been completed in Mwisho Mwisho hotel, Siaya, Kenya in conjunction with Kenya network of telecentres - kentel.

It took place on 4 – 6th June 2007. The forum presented practitioners in the East African region a chance to network, build relationships, and find solutions to fundamental issues that affect telecentre performance, share best practices especially in telecentre management. Among the issues discussed were;
Bandwidth sharing: The practitioners to a large extent agreed that connectivity is the living challenge within the movement.

In the session FADECO’s Joseph Sekiku provided a summary of the e-session to focus the face to face discussions, noting that two connectivity solutions where discussed at length; bandwidth sharing and Pay as You Go. As a rather unique area, yet requiring technical know how; participants preferred to discuss ways bandwidth can be shared and the challenges associated with implementing it. Among the key outcomes of this was;

Ways it can be shared
Bandwidth can be extended to neighbors through local area network using Ethernet cables in a distance not more than 100 meters especially if boosters are not possible. But the most practical way noted was through wireless connection using antenna and indoor connection. Also noted is bandwidth sharing through VSAT, which apparently Kenya Telcom is marketing. Others in some practice are CDMA, GPRS.

The challenges associated with bandwidth sharing

Although good for connectivity sustainability participants expressed challenges like; failure of clients to pay after service consumption, bandwidth sharing means reduced speed each time a new client is added on the connection, some potential partners do not see the need to be connected, the further away from the hub the poorer the connection, some donor commitments can not allow the centre to share the bandwidth and poor ISP service. They recommended that it is better to integrate Bandwidth sharing at conception stage.

Content management: The session looked at content management based on successful case study discussions from telecentres in each of the participating countries. The groups included; Kubere information Centre, Nabweru CMC, Forest Action Network and Gabula’tudde Women Grip telecentre.

Emerging experiences
It was noted that all the successful cases thoughtfully involved; a good number of partners and experts and community members, used a number of multimedia formats to package and repackage content and translate materials into local languages. The most common method of dissemination is face to face.
Challenges highlighted included; content development efforts are hard to sustain because the end user cannot afford to pay the people who collect the information. Also all the cases showed lack of a proper content management system.

Telecentre Management; the session facilitate by UgaBYTES’s Sulah Ndaula focused mainly at four telecentre performance areas; effectiveness – meeting mission and goals, efficiency – delivery of services in reasonable cost brackets, relevancy – remaining purposive all the time and financial viability – having good cost recovery plus mechanisms. He further noted that to achieve telecentre performance the telecentre manager should properly manage the external environment, telecentre capacity and telecentre motivation to serve the community. But emphasizing that telecentre capacity in the most important of all as it is responsible for making things to happen in the other areas, thus four groups broke out to discuss issues in this area including; strategic leaders, financial management, information management and marketing telecentre services.

observations
strategic leadership
Participants highlighted that for the telecentre to have strategic leadership, it should build team work and shared and wide skills among team members. Among skills required was; good communication skills - information documentation, good negotiator, public relations, planning skills – financial management, budgeting, marketing, entrepreneurship skills, and basic technical skills. Additional skills were fronted by Pete Cranston during the online session.
Financial management
Participants noted that for a telecentre to have a good financial system it needs to; Set up a proper management system, with duty clerks to manage inflows and outflows. It was said that keeping proper accounting records, ensuring financial income security, working within the budget limits and having proper banking system are a prerequisite for good financial management.
Implementation challenges highlighted included; lack of technical competence to develop good budgets, lack of financial system to restrain managers to work in budget brackets, limited funds to help the telecentre in developing good financial systems, long durations in taking decisions, staff conflict of interest and donor influence.

content management
Participants noted that a good content management system must be able to progressively capture community needs, capture information that satisfy the needs, disseminate the information to the community and continue to monitor and evaluate the performance of the system. However, participants noted that several challenges are still associated with content management including; the justification for financial viability of content efforts, intellectual property challenges and community resistance to change.


Marketing telecentre and telecentre services
It was agreed that marketing plays a core function in the success of the telecentre. Some of the highlighted marketing functions included; creation of awareness of the centre, facilitates telecentre objectives attainment, attracts partners, increases telecentre usage, and promotes the spirit of community ownership and sustainability.
Knowledge sharing; this was facilitated by Esther Nasikye, telecentre.org community content facilitator at UgaBYTES. When opening the session, she noted that success of each centre has a lot to learn from other telecentres across the world but few stories are actually shared. In many cases waiting for face to face events which are actually very few...

Sharing methods, process and challenges
In groups of two, participants summarized their experiences of the EATLF and also shared stories from their telecentres. Over 20 stories were captured and will be shared later by the practitioner, due lack of connectivity at the venue of the forum


Networking telecentres; the session was facilitated by Constantine Obuya and Charles Odaga. The session broke into three groups handling; national network growth, sustainability of networks and envisioning an East African telecentre.

National networks
Participants highlighted several issues related to the subject. They noted that before establishing national network practitioners should be clear whether it actually make sense to them but it should be able to have a passionate leader. The network should be hosted at a reliably stable organization though lead organization should not mistake hosting for control over the network and work towards developing the mission, systems and mapping out potential members within the country. The systems should aim to mainstream the vision, mission, objectives, constitution and at least a three year strategic plan. There should be good level member participation through out the process.
sustainability
Participant noted that for networks to be sustainable they should; have a lean secretariat, involve all the key stakeholders, facilitate the network leadership content, not duplicate telecentres work, be accessible to its members, have telecentre mandate for leadership and look for and advocate with relevant partners.

East African network
On discussing East African network it was noted that networks need to develop clear activities. Some of the proposed activities were; policy advocacy, promoting knowledge sharing, encouraging network, coordination of the legal activities, promoting co-existence with national networks and creation of a hub of network information. Also highlighted was the importance to constitute a board whose members are hosted in a national network. For sustainability and financing some practitioners proposed a member fee, which was not valued to be paid by each of the member national networks.
A task force comprising members from each of the East African countries including Rwanda and Burundi was formed to ensure East African Telecentre network promotion task force. The mandate of the task force was to formulate the necessary documents for the regional network before the 4th EATLF. Ideally, with Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya having national telecentre networks, then the idea of the East African network of telecentre networks will come to fruition soon.

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