ICT4D Blog

Development Cooperation 2.0 (III): Florencio Ceballos: IDRC: Learnings, limitations and challenges from the telecentre.org experience

Florencio Ceballos
IDRC: Learnings, limitations and challenges from the telecentre.org experience

Crisis of performance, effectiveness, results, etc. in development cooperation, despite the increasing amount of resources devoted to it.

Reasons

Solutions?

Development and ICT4D are blurring concepts that are becoming indivisible aspects of Development in general.

We’ve much focused in access to infrastructures that we didn’t realize that mobile telephony was closing the digital divide at our backs. So, how does the telecenter has to adapt to this trend and make of (a) the PC+Internet a (still) valuable tool and (b) the mobile phone a more powerful tool (as the PC+Internet is)

New cooperation models: from charity to collaborative business strategies where both partners (northern, southern) benefit/profit from ICT4D projects.

More on horizontal leadership

The assumption that you (the North) can change the world, with just one project, designed in the framework of your office, is absolutely wrong. It’s better to empower, boost the leaders that are already operating this change through their daily work, so they can have a wider and deeper reach and impact, so the social change truly happens and at a higher level.

It’s not that we have to forget about all we’ve learned through the years about development, but just forget about the asymmetry that now rules development cooperation.

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