One of the challenges in making a telecentre achieving socio-economic growth in the rural or remote areas is that a major chunk of the content presently on the World Wide Web is not very relevant to the people in the rural communities. The question thus is “Who is telling the stories?” Critics have said that often telecentres are like Cadillacs in rural areas. And so, “Is Prometheus riding a Cadillac?” (Alfonso Gumucio Dagron)
There could be two possible solutions really to the above questions-
- Community participation
- Local content generation
These are issues which need to be addressed right at the inception stage of a telecentre, and only then can the full potential of telecentres be realized.

A positive example of such an initiative is of the CREST telecottages in east Romania, which have developed an interesting strategy. CREST won’t start a telecottage till there if the community doesn’t promise full commitment. They follow a bottom-up development approach. These telecottages faced the problems of making the local communities participate actively in the telecottages. Distant telecottages were connected through a community radio (which was handled by the local community, after technical training) and Internet was used initially as a tool for “radio browsing” to get the community acquainted with the web. Such a step leveraging technologies behind both community radios as well as Internet in a telecentre is an approach that can be adopted. This also helps counter the problems with low literacy rates.

Getting local community support though isn’t easy as it’s difficult to convince most locals about the viability of ICTs in the first place. According to a case study in TARAhaat in Punjab, India, the locals preferred their girls learning cooking in the telecentres instead of ICTs. The telecentre association then tied up with a different organization to teach the girls cooking, and it was seen that a percentage of these girls then enrolled in IT courses also.

Another way to ensure community participation would be to make them develop local content. Research has shown that very few Africans have actually written about Africa. The local community there has shown little faith in sharing knowledge with anyone else, as they fear “knowledge-theft”. Efforts are required in this direction to help establish a mutual feeling of trust. Local involvement here would be critical because if local people themselves work for the telecentres a feeling of empowerment would result assuring sustainability in the long run.
In all probability then, guess it is time when we get people tell their own stories!