ICTlogy

Abstract:

Sustainability First is a research project carried out to capture the key sustainability lessons emerging from this mix of dynamic and evolving efforts, which is unique due to the involvement of such varied participants, which include grassroots leaders, corporate executives, bureaucrats, and politicians. Although the word “sustainability” implies broader social, cultural, political, and environmental aspects, the attention of the current research was focused mainly on economic sustainability. The research was carried out over nearly two years, beginning in January 2007, and involved a deeper cross-section of the telecentre ecosystem, which started with telecentre operators from individual telecentres in South Asia, Africa, and South America and extended through the senior managers of selected corporate, civil society, and government institutions in Brazil, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Although this book derives its main lessons from five key case studies, which feature ATN (Brazil), Grameenphone CIC (Bangladesh), D.Net (Bangladesh), Drishtee (India) and Sarvodaya-Fusion (Sri Lanka), the overall content of the book was not limited to those lessons, but was derived from the broader spectrum of telecentre experiences studied in Africa, Asia, and South America. This book attempts to capture the rich lessons of that relatively complex larger research study in order to uncover the key constraining factors that work against telecentre sustainability, and then to derive key strategies for success from selected telecentre networks.