The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity
Chapter 6
Community Multimedia Centres:
Creating digital opportunities for all
Stella Hughes
In the era of the knowledge society and the knowledge economy,
access to the infrastructure to share knowledge is paramount for
social and economic development. Within the international
development community, there is now strong consensus on this.
It is widely agreed that information, communication and knowledge cannot remain the
preserve of development experts in tackling poverty but must become the basic tools of the
poor in improving their own lives. There is equally strong consensus on the dangers of the
accelerating inequity of access to knowledge both within and between countries.
Strategies to increase access to knowledge for development need to integrate fully
both their approach to the new knowledge resources and their approach to traditional
knowledge systems. On the one hand, the introduction of new ICTs into poor or marginalised
communities works best when it draws on traditional channels of communication and
information, on the reservoirs of indigenous knowledge within the community and on its
existing information resources. On the other hand, traditional forms of knowledge acquisition
are insufficient to foster an inclusive knowledge society. People in poor and marginalised
communities need access to mechanisms that provide multiple sources of rapid information
and information exchange. The Internet and associated technologies are pivotal to the new
means of knowledge acquisition. The question is: how should new ICTs and traditional
knowledge systems be integrated at the community level in order to maximise the
development potential of both?
Kothmale, Sri Lanka
In response to this challenge, UNESCO examined two areas in which it already had a well-
established track record: long-standing involvement with grass-roots community radio; and
more recent involvement with the multipurpose community telecentre. The result of bringing
the two together in a novel manner is the Community Multimedia Centre (CMC). This
combines community broadcasting with community telecentre facilities and offers a strategy
that integrates new and traditional information and communication systems at the local level.
When community radio and new ICTs are actively combined, they offer far greater
possibilities for engaging a community in its own development. The possibilities generated by
the combination of the two are not confined to quantity or range; the qualitative nature of
these possibilities also changes. This is because of the particularly dynamic relationship
between communication and information, between contact and content. The combination of a
grassroots public platform with access to information highways promotes the public debate
and public accountability that are essential for strengthening democracy and good
governance. The combination of local radio with a community database developed by local
people, building up a store of relevant data for educational, informational and developmental
requirements, provides a solid knowledge base for the community and an open learning
infrastructure for all its members. It also takes into account the preference of rural
communities for a collective assimilation of knowledge, in contrast to the prevailing mode of
individual access to Internet.
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Stella Hughes – Community Multimedia Centres
This summarises the rationale behind the first pilot project supported by UNESCO in
this field. The CMC is a recent development and the first of its kind, the Kothmale Internet
Radio project in Sri Lanka, only reaches the end of its pilot project phase, with an
independent, external evaluation at the time of writing (last quarter 2001). Kothmale
Community Radio (KCR) was set up 20 years ago by the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation
when the construction of the Kothmale dam displaced entire villages. Local radio was chosen
as a strategy for helping to rebuild the social fabric for those displaced within this rural
community and KCR became an important part of many people’s lives. The Kothmale
Internet Radio project added a community telecentre facility to the radio station. From the
outset, access to Internet was considered both in terms of direct access for members of the
community, through training courses or the help of facilitators, and also in terms of indirect
access through “radio browsing” programmes. In this way, community radio is used as a
gateway for a poor community to actively participate in the global knowledge society through
“radio browsing” of websites, by encouraging the use of Internet access at the station and
encouraging the use of radio as a platform for public debate.
This approach overturns many assumptions about Internet and related technologies:
that they are primarily useful for professionals, business people, academics and students or
that they are intrinsically part of a consumer life-style, offering new services almost
exclusively in the domain of leisure, entertainment, travel and consumer spending. In
Kothmale, radio browsing programmes focus on local economic activities, development and
governance issues, culture and entertainment. The daily programmes respond to queries from
listeners. Presenters first select relevant, reliable websites and broadcast the programme with
local resource persons as studio guests (e.g. doctors for a health programme) who discuss the
contents of the mostly English-language sites directly in the national languages. They also
describe the websites and explain how they are browsing from one web page to another. Thus,
listeners not only get the information they requested, but they understand how it is made
available on the web. They can respond to the programme and they know that essential data
will remain available in the community database if they wish to make individual use of it.
With this daily radio programme, there is continuity within a common learning process
encouraging greater inter-activity with and by the community.
The impact of this new way of creating shared meanings and interpretations of
information for development is a key marker of the success of the project. The radio
programme has triggered a greater interest among community members in receiving
information related to poverty alleviation efforts, health, formal and non-formal education,
livelihood skills and individual empowerment. The assumption behind this approach – that
Internet can be useful for everyone – was readily taken up by listeners, most of whom had
probably no idea that that there could exist a more elitist approach to new ICTs. This echoes
the experience of many projects introducing new technologies to poor communities in the
developing world: there are few psychological barriers to overcome among people who have
had little or no access to information and communication technologies in any form – new or
traditional. A CD-ROM is no more intimidating than an encyclopaedia when one has never
used an encyclopaedia.
The Kothmale log book filled by each individual user of the telecentre shows a very
wide range of subjects researched by a wide range of users. With an adult literacy rate of 82
percent, Kothmale offers fertile ground for this approach to new knowledge resources. Log
book reports vary from one farmer researching information on organic tomato farming to
another looking for new varieties of seeds, to a baker seeking new recipes, the local
undertaker looking for an on-line funeral business management course, a health worker
printing data on mosquito-borne diseases and young people looking for international job
opportunities. The radio browsing programmes have also prompted illiterate people to go
online with, for example, an elderly woman seeking the help of a facilitator to visit the site of
a sacred Buddhist shrine in India. The radio browsing programmes cater in a similar way for
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The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity
different interest groups. A tea farmer who presents a radio browsing programme found a
Tamil-language website explaining new tea drying techniques in southern India and shared
this information with the local tea farmers on a browsing programme. Many farmers cultivate
bamboo and new uses for bamboo were introduced to Kothmale after a programme browsed a
website in the Asia region and found new crafts using bamboo.
When looking at the remarkable ease and speed with which KCR moved into this
new, multimedia centre approach, certain pre-existing conditions stand out clearly as having
an important impact within the project. The fact that the CMC was built into a well-
established community radio station with a core professional staff and experienced grassroots
volunteer staff meant many development topics were already covered regularly on air and in
ways that sought systematically to convey locally-relevant information in context and with a
degree of interactivity between listeners and programme makers. Local resource persons with
a traditional role as “knowledge-brokers” for the local community had already been identified
and mobilised to participate in community broadcasting. Well-adapted local programming by
trusted and familiar broadcasters offered an excellent foundation for the introduction of new
ICTs. At the same time, high literacy rates and the generalised secondary-school level of
education of the younger generations in Kothmale also impacted positively on both the range
and the number of people using ICTs.
Building on these favourable conditions, the project strategy of reaching out to the
entire community ensured a continuum of information and communication, involving both the
spoken and written word, the most educated and the least educated. The daily browsing
programmes provide a crucial link between those more likely and those less likely to use ICTs
individually. Even those who would never go to the telecentre themselves have a basic
understanding of and share a common language to discuss ICTs, because the radio browsing
programmes have made cyberspace familiar territory. The clearest illustration of this is the
number of cases in which a senior family member has listened to a browsing programme, then
encouraged a younger family member to go onto Internet in search of information useful for
the small family business. In Kothmale, there may be a noticeable “generation gap” in terms
of individual access to ICTs, but not in terms of appreciating their usefulness.
Such positive factors for developing a CMC did not remove the need for carefully
planned outreach activities targeting all groups within the community. Those hardest to reach
have been young girls. In spite of messages on the radio announcing free training for women
and girls, few came from the poorest hamlets of Kothmale. Only door-to-door “canvassing”
finally convinced some of the most marginalised women that the training really was meant for
them. One of the lessons of the project has been that proactive gender policies have to be
pursued at every level, from targeting women and girls for training opportunities to ensuring
that men do not jump the queue for the computers when women are in line. Again, the
combination of direct and indirect access to ICTs helps to bridge the gender gap. In
Kothmale, 41 percent of telecentre users are women, but they constitute over 50 percent of
“radio browsing” users who also interact with new ICTs by telephoning or sending questions
to the “radio browsing” producers, then listening to, reacting to and using the information
broadcast from the Internet.
Lack of Sinhalese-language materials on-line was a major obstacle, only partly
overcome by local efforts to train users to create webpages. Although web skills are so
widespread that 40 percent of those making web pages in Kothmale are now peer-taught, only
when there are many more “Kothmales” producing their own web pages in Sri Lanka will the
lack of locally relevant information in national languages be made good. It is worth noting
here that it would take just 50 CMCs in Sri Lanka to ensure that every Sri Lankan is within
reach of ICTs and on the right side of the digital divide. The language barrier is less of a
problem for Tamil-speakers, thanks to the relatively large number of Tamil-language websites
emanating from the large Tamil population of southern India. At present, the radio browsing
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formula is the only means to overcome entirely the language barrier, as information on
English-language websites is explained and discussed directly in Sinhalese and Tamil. One
advantage for Kothmale is the existence of many regionally-based English-language sites
carrying a vast range of information relevant for much of the Asian region. The number of
school-students at KCR after school hours, surfing the web in English and using English for
their email exchanges, indicates that language is far less of a barrier for the younger
generations.
Achieving a satisfactory supply of relevant content involves more than the vital
matter of identifying and using suitable websites, locally-created or across the Internet. The
Kothmale database is building up a collection of useful on-line data, including administrative
forms, fact sheets and so forth. On-line governance is a promising future prospect as local and
national government documents begin to go online. The CMC has great potential to evolve
into a community learning centre, with a library of multimedia learning materials and access
to distance education and training courses just some of the possible uses. Already, two access
points at public libraries in nearby towns extend access to Internet to many more users and
make the physical link to library collections. Local schoolteachers use the Internet to enrich
their lessons and take their classes to visit the centre. Some unplanned outcomes of the project
can have a significant impact on contents creation and local use of online resources. The
combination of individual and community interaction fosters the emergence of new
democratic initiatives with a focus on e-campaigning. A new, active and influential
environmental NGO, Green Lanka, germinated from the Internet browsing of some young
Kothmale residents who decided to “do something” with their new-found IT resources. Green
Lanka must be one of only a few NGOs around the world awarding a national “green label”
for exports from headquarters in a village (although demand has obliged the NGO to open an
office in the capital, Colombo).
The strategy of combining direct and indirect access to new ICTs has also to be
assessed in terms of scale and capacity. At present, the number of computers made available
to the public through this project is minimal – about six machines in all. While the small
telecentre facility and two access points in public libraries can receive up to one or two
thousand visits a month, the radio browsing programmes attract many times that number of
listeners every day. In this way, a minimal investment in ICT equipment can have an quasi-
exponential impact within the community. In the future, some local people and, crucially,
other local institutions can be expected to acquire their own equipment as usage generates
revenue and purchase costs come down. As the number of users increases, it may become
commercially viable for small, private Internet kiosks to set up business. There is no reason to
believe that any of these developments would obviate the need for or the usefulness of the
present system of mass access through radio browsing and the proactive approach to broad-
based participation fostered by community telecentre outreach activities. The CMC formula
not only looks set to remain relevant for the medium term, but could become a permanent
feature alongside the individual user approach of wealthy consumer societies.
As a pioneering pilot project, Kothmale saw a considerable proportion of the project
budget allocated to research and evaluation. From the outset, the project was supported by the
national authorities and national institutions – with government ministries supplying the
dedicated Internet connection, the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the
radio station and its professional staff, and Colombo University providing technical support
for the computers and networks. This support was important in order to start up a completely
new activity in a poor rural area where the level of awareness had not yet created a demand
for ICTs. It also needed strong public support for another reason: there was a major credibility
barrier to overcome. What did poor, rural people speaking Singhala and Tamil need with
Internet? What could justify making ICTs a development priority when there were other,
pressing needs? What motivation would people have and would they sustain their interest for
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The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity
any length of time? Today, that battle for credibility has been won and will not need to be
fought again – in Sri Lanka, at least.
With the example of Kothmale to build on, it is likely that future CMC projects in Sri
Lanka will follow a somewhat different model: establishing business plans and sustainability
strategies from the outset in order to reduce the degree of dependence on public support,
reducing the research component as the model becomes more established and networking
with each other to pool resources, training and so on. Links with other institutions such as
educational and training institutes, development networks or agricultural co-operatives could
become a core component of a CMC.
It is conceivable that, as in other countries where broadcast regulations permit it, the
community radio component of a CMC could eventually be started up by the community and
be fully owned and operated by the community. However, the intrinsic value of building the
CMC on an existing local station that is part of the national public broadcaster cannot be
overlooked. In the case of Kothmale, the high standard of broadcasting at the station was
without a doubt a key to the success of the radio browsing formula. Paradoxically, this model
might be of particular interest in those developing countries where chronically under-funded
public radios struggle to compete with flourishing new FM stations that are free from public
service constraints. By forging a new public service role integrating ICTs, the local stations of
national broadcasters could find a new lease of life and benefit from public revenue going into
national IT plans.
Timbuktu, Mali
While in Kothmale the CMC grew from the community radio station, in Timbuktu, Mali, it is
the community telecentre that has become the basis for a CMC, with the four radio stations of
the town sharing use of a new radio studio within the telecentre. The Timbuktu community
telecentre, a pilot project backed by a consortium of partners (UNESCO, IDRC, ITU,
SOTELMA (national telecom company), WHO and FAO), opened in April 1999 and was
planned as a fairly large-scale infrastructure eventually able to offer specialised services such
as telemedicine and distance learning as well as basic services to all members of the
community. UNESCO added the radio equipment to the telecentre in September 2001 in order
to enable the local radio stations to make full use of new ICTs and start radio browsing
programmes. The local municipal station, Radio Bouctou, and the three private or associative
stations, Radio Alfarouk, Radio Lafia and Radio Jamana run on minimal revenue, equipment
and human resources.
Timbuktu and the surrounding area have a far smaller population than Kothmale and
an adult illiteracy rate of 50 percent. Its telecentre – three times larger than Kothmale’s, with
18 computers – is constantly busy. When this ICT project was proposed and even though the
literacy levels, income levels and population density are far lower than in Sri Lanka, there
was no credibility barrier to overcome. Timbuktu suffers from such extreme geographical
isolation – with currently just one flight a week made by a 14-seater plane and river boat
services taking four days from the capital Bamako – that the contact potential of ICTs was
embraced with great enthusiasm from the outset. A remarkable indicator of this support and
degree of faith in the benefits of these technologies was the substantial financial contribution
made not only by townspeople but by the inhabitants of 43 outlying villages.
The telecentre made a series of attempts to encourage the town’s radio stations to use
its services. Timbuktu’s four radio stations broadcast in a total of six languages to the
townspeople and to villages within a 100 km radius. The first users of the community
telecentre were not surprisingly the local elite – teachers, office workers, doctors, business
people and so on. In order to expand access, a study was made of user needs according to
social groups – women, youth, nomadic herders, traders, media etc. – and outreach activities
organised. The results were not necessarily what could have been expected: some categories
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Stella Hughes – Community Multimedia Centres
that might have been thought the hardest to reach became aware of the value of ICTs much
sooner than, for example, the radio staff of the town.
Several illiterate and semi-literate Touareg camel herders were among the quickest to
use the centre in order to open email accounts and deal directly with their tourist clients
overseas. While these users now know how to navigate, open their mail box and access their
mail with ease, they have to print out each message as they read with great difficulty or only
with assistance. Similarly, writing a reply is a difficult task and some use the telecentre email-
writing service. This does not appear to be an obstacle as the total cost is cheap and the
message instantaneous. As a measure of motivation, one Touareg travels 400km about once a
month to access his email. If he cannot get a lift with a tourist convoy, this takes him up to a
week by camel. This link enables him to run his small tourist guide business and launch
projects in his oasis village of Arawane. Most other herders working as guides and using the
centre travel in daily from camps some 10 km out of Timbuktu.
The hardest-to-reach group – young girls – still forms a minority of users. The single
most successful strategy to encourage Internet access among schoolgirls was to find them
email pen-friends, mostly from neighbouring countries in French-speaking West Africa. For
women’s outreach activities, as for those targeting other groups, existing structures were
mobilised and local women’s associations still provide the key link to the female population.
Most women users are however still from the more privileged groups such as office workers
and health workers. Illiterate adults were targeted with great success. Computer-based literacy
classes are in demand and three literacy tutors run courses in the telecentre in which they take
a discreet, low-profile approach, allowing their “students” to blend in with other computer-
users. A self-tutoring literacy software package is currently being finalised.
In contrast to the successes of outreach activities for these groups, attempts to attract
radio staff initially had significantly lower impact. Only two people working in radio stations
came to use the centre spontaneously. The heads of the radio stations or their representatives
were first given an introductory course. This was followed by a full basic computer training
course given free to two staff members from each station. The telecentre then donated a
computer to each station, stipulating that these should be used to train colleagues by those
who had followed the basic training course. Another training session was carried out for radio
staff on use of CD-ROMs and the telecentre staff then visited each station, presenting the
contents of development CD-ROMs and loading contents onto the stations’ computers.
Almost a year after these efforts began, the computers in the radio stations were however still
visibly under-used and radio staff in a noticeable minority among telecentre users. Usage of
the computers in the radio stations appeared to be inhibited by problems of social relations in
the workplace: those who now had computer skills were not in a hierarchical position that
allowed them to take initiatives with “high-status” equipment – the computer.
Only when the telecentre got a high-speed line and was able to offer a good Internet
connection did radio staff use of computers pick up. A free Internet course was given to one
staff member per station (offered to those who had not benefited from previous training
sessions) and free access to Internet and print-outs of information for programmes offered to
all radio staff. At this stage, the first real numbers of radio staff began using the centre,
opening email accounts and surfing the web. However, the only radio programmes for which
web searches were used regularly concerned sports, music stars and horoscopes. Attempts by
the telecentre managers to organise the making of development programmes in the telecentre
failed. As in many other parts of the developing world, in Timbuktu development partners –
NGOs and IGOs – have been in the habit of paying local radio stations to broadcast
development programmes. Although the development partners may view this as general
support for community media, the hard-pressed radio directors naturally enough come to view
development programmes as a legitimate source of revenue and are reluctant to use their own
resources to make relatively time-consuming, high-input programmes.
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The One to Watch – Radio, New ICTs and Interactivity
The radio equipment donated by UNESCO and housed in the telecentre, a Wantok
FM radio station-in-a-suitcase, was intended to break this pattern and encourage greater use of
Internet by radio staff for making programmes on development issues as part of their regular
programming. Training was given in radio browsing techniques: pre-selection of useful
websites, advanced search methods, methods of saving or “storing” selected webpages,
techniques (for both presenters and resource persons) for describing or visualising web
contents and so on. The radio browsing concept was embraced with great enthusiasm by the
generally young radio presenters who were eager to use the technique to cover development
issues and clearly enjoyed this new dimension of radio presenting, experiencing it as
enhancing their role and status as information-brokers. This high level of motivation is crucial
as these presenters are paid very little or not at all. With the introduction of the suitcase radio,
their use of the telecentre immediately rose.
However, none of the radio staff had sufficiently good web browsing skills to be able
to prepare browsing programmes with ease after the initial, limited number of training
sessions. Under the agreement made with the radio and telecentre directors, the telecentre
staff will continue Internet training and assist in radio browsing production, at least until the
presenters become fully competent. The telecentre now plans to budget for digital audio
editing software and a minidisk, which will further encourage radio staff to use the centre and
to develop radio/telecentre co-productions. The advantages of a co-production system benefit
both parties. The telecentre needs to expand its user-base in order to increase its revenue to
the point of being fully sustainable and radio browsing programmes should stimulate demand.
Although the radio stations, in return for free services at the centre, had begun broadcasting
adverts for the telecentre and its services, it is clear that radio browsing can raise far greater
awareness among many more listeners than an advert can.
One of the reasons for low levels of production of development programmes cited by
the directors, along with the revenue issue, was the difficulty in getting resource persons to go
to the radio stations to take part in programmes. This difficulty should greatly diminish when
the resource persons are asked to go to the telecentre to make a programme, as their
motivation for going there is far higher: they have email accounts, use Internet and world-
processing and would generally make good use of a visit. Another benefit for the radios lies in
the fact that none of the radio stations previously had a production studio and were only able
to make pre-recorded programmes in the few hours per day when they were off air. They now
have the option of using the equipment in the telecentre for recorded or live programmes.
The telecentre’s regular users also represent a reservoir of valuable interviewees. The
telecentre plans to begin producing regular “how to” programmes on ICTs with users as
studio guests. The impact on target audiences of a semi-literate Touareg explaining in
Tamacheq how he navigates and uses his email is likely to be far higher than if the same
explanation is given by a computer engineer. A teenage girl describing in Arabic or Songhai
the correspondence she exchanges with email pen friends may, like the nomad, serve as a role
model for listeners in her target group.
New programmes are still in the planning stage but a number of existing programmes
have been identified as lending themselves to development into browsing programmes. Radio
Bouctou has a three-hour programme every evening for the villages of the region and takes
calls from relatives abroad with urgent messages, relays announcements and so forth. These
villages, which supported the telecentre with donations, have seen little return for their
support so far. The director of Radio Bouctou believes that radio browsing for rural audiences
could quickly become the first concrete benefit for villagers arising from their investment.
One possibility would be to organise a shared email account for each village, enabling distant
relative to send news more often and far less expensively. Browsing programmes could target
fishing and farming villages with appropriate information for their economic activities and
development needs. Radio Alfarouk uses very young volunteer presenters during the school
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holidays and these young people could quickly become the “ICT-interface” for school
children and students. Not surprisingly, the telecentre has already become a centre of
attraction and something of a meeting place for many young people who spend time there
every day. Youth browsing programmes could direct them to the best websites for young
people and show them that many of their concerns are experienced and discussed by young
people all over the world.
The impact of the new telecentre-based radio studio will be monitored for both
quantitative and qualitative impact. The number of browsing programmes will be monitored
and compared to previous levels of development programming. The number and range of
resource persons and the frequency of their participation in browsing programmes will be
logged. The topics covered and websites used will be recorded and information on the best
web sources made available to all radio staff. Impact will be evaluated in terms of listener
response to programmes and request for particular browsing subjects and also in terms of
changes in telecentre user patterns. New users will be asked if they decided to come to the
centre after following radio browsing programmes and both the number and the range of new
users will be matched against radio browsing topics aired.
There are certainly many challenges ahead for the Timbuktu telecentre/radio
partnership. There are fewer relevant websites emanating from and intended for developing
countries in the French than in the English-speaking world. One response may be to have a
focus on CD-ROM browsing as well as Internet browsing. If the telecentre builds up a good
library of educational CD-ROMs, for example, this will not only enrich browsing
programmes but stimulate demand for use of the computers for learning activities. Another
challenge lies in the fact that radio browsing in Timbuktu will have to be done in many more
languages than in Kothmale and will have to cater for a far wider range of economic, cultural
and social contexts. The radio stations will not derive any direct financial benefit from radio
browsing and much will depend on staff motivation. However, indirect financial benefits
could include greater support by development partners in response to more effective
development programming.
Above all, this is not a new project with a project co-ordinator and it depends on a
new dynamic being “spontaneously” created within existing structures: the community
telecentre will be seeking to stimulate use of new ICTs by radio stations struggling to
compete for very limited advertising revenue. The most immediate motivation for the radio
stations lies in the high potential for raising the quality of their programming and therefore
getting a very positive audience response, in the availability within the telecentre of excellent
equipment for programme-making and in the readiness of telecentre staff and resource
persons to contribute to contents development. In the future, networking is likely to improve
the situation for contents development, further easing the problem for the cash-strapped radios
of time-consuming development production. Mali’s Maison de la Presse in Bamako already
has a daily on-line radio information service. The telecentre plans to equip each radio station
with a modem and a connection to the telecentre as a next step.
The CMC formula adopted in Timbuktu is now being considered as a model in
national plans for ICT access in Mali’s 703 “communes” or local districts. The plan to build a
national network of telecentres, ultimately in every commune, is in the final stages of
preparation. An initial target will be to set up telecentres in the 50 main administrative centres
of Mali. Originally, planners had decided that the best way to link ICT access with
broadcasting would be to equip every radio station (of which Mali has over 100) with a
computer and a link to the nearest telecentre. This is now being reconsidered in favour of
creating a radio studio within each telecentre for all nearby radio stations to use. First and
foremost, this should be more cost-effective in a context where funds for the ambitious
national access plan are likely to be hard to come by. Crucially, it will also ensure that radio
staff are brought into an ICT–rich environment in which they can benefit fully from training
and specialist support. As a first step, this appears preferable to the alternative: introducing
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minimal ICT equipment into radio studios where there is no specialist back-up to facilitate use
of the equipment and where there is no assurance that the equipment will be used adequately.
The contrasting examples of Kothmale and Timbuktu show just how many factors
quite extraneous to the actual technology have a determining influence on these two
communities’ access to new ICTs. In both cases, the goal of knowledge-sharing for
development is reached through the essential channel of radio broadcasting. It can be argued
that individual access to ICTs is also shared in some ways by the individual’s circle of family,
friends and colleagues. In fact, these two processes together – individual direct access and
mass indirect access – offer the optimum formula for achieving both breadth and depth of
impact of new ICTs within the community. This is not only because they combine individual
empowerment and community empowerment but also because together, they involve the
community as a whole in its entry into the knowledge society and knowledge economy. The
continuum in the flow and exchange of information between the educated and uneducated,
those with and without international languages, between the spoken word and the written
word is a force for community cohesion. It also acts as a conduit for the flow and exchange
between new knowledge resources and traditional knowledge systems, in which both are able
to express their full potential.
> > > – < < <
Stella Hughes is Chief of the Media and Society Section in the Communication and
Information Sector of UNESCO. She was responsible for launching and coordinating
UNESCO’s Community Multimedia Centres programme. She joined UNESCO after twenty
years as a broadcaster and journalist. <[Link]>
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