Contents for Nenasalas (Rural Knowledge Centres and eLibraries)

Now I am working as a Content officer for Nenasalas, I am willing to know more information or Lesson learned form someone how to deploy Online & Offline Content and Services to Nenasalas

The e-Sri Lanka program was initiated by ICT Agency with the view of harnessing the benefits of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) towards poverty reduction and growth along with peace building. Nenasalas (Rural Knowledge Centres and eLibraries), that are being set up in the rural areas, are the key stone in achieving the above mentioned goal of the e-Sri Lanka initiative. It is through Nenasalas that ICT Agency aims to bring ICT to every village of Sri Lanka. Hence, the success of NenaSala’
program is essential for achieving the goals of e-Sri Lanka. ICTA has already completed
implementation of over 500 Nenasalas across the country and are operated by Community organizations Religious institutions and Individuals.

In this regard, our organization namely, ComputerLand International (Pvt) Ltd. has been selected to provide ‘Service & Performance Monitoring and Support System & required to identify and deploy Content and Services to Nenasalas according to the requirement of the community for 180 Nenasalas’ in the 7 districts;

Major challenges that we are likely to face in content development include the following:

Lack of understanding of local demand among the practitioners
Absence of a network and lack of partnership among the stakeholders
Non-availability of resources to develop content
Lack of availability of local and relevant contents in organized format
Unicode format of the local language

In order to overcome these challenges, our methodology will address and incorporate the following;

Understanding the local need
Building broader partnerships among the stakeholders
Establishing a mechanism to share resources (content) available on the net
Exchanging experiences and learning in content development
Mobilizing resources for research, new content development and update of content
Capacity building of the practitioners including Nenasala operators

The content requirement will be regional specific. For example, content required by the community in a coastal village will be different from the content required from a community in an interior village. The content requirements of the specific communities has to be identified through a community needs assessment survey. Content that will be useful to the rural community could be categorized in to following categories;

Rural livelihood information
Education related content
Health related content
Content related to rural empowerment
Content related to other areas

Discussion on Findings after the Need Assignment survey

The majority of the respondents in all the districts surveyed expressed their desire to have agriculture related content, health related content and education related content. There is a great demand for religious content in Buddhism in all the districts surveyed except. Moreover, content related to job opportunities & government services rank among their top requirements. As most of the centres don’t offer VoIP, video conferencing and chatting services, the general public continue to use traditional means of communication. Large number of people requested for information related government policies.

Hence, the content and services that are in great demand are agriculture related, health related, education related, religious & moral values related and modern communication methods. The required content can be further divided as follows;

Agriculture – related content

Educational content
o Content related to school curriculum
o Content related to vocational & professional studies
o Content to improve general knowledge and living skills
o Content related to career growth

Health related content

Religious/ Ethical content
o Buddhism
o Hinduism
o Islam
o Classical literature (Sinhalese, Tamil, English)
o Moral stories

Job opportunities
Government related sites
Content for the Handicraft industry
Modern Communication means such as VoIP etc.

If someone have above contents that we can implement in Sri Lanka please let me know so we can help our telecentres.