Professionalizing Telecenter Operators ! How can it be done ?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Wangchuk Chungyalpa on January 13, 2009 at 11:50pm

Telecentres could qualify as an industry. Cyber cafes / cyber dhabas are an industry. The challenge lies in accumulating data specific to the industry, especially in countries like India and many other developing countries where there exists a gap in government aganecies and private businesses. Besides unlike the auto industry telecentres would be constituted as a small industry thus providing even less incentive for gathering data.

I agree completely. Telecentres should be run by professional and experienced individuals. Generally, the quality of the service is directly tied in with the professionalism of the service providers. I think volunteers can play a major part in successfully operating a telecentre. In the NGO sector dedicated volunteers play a critical role in making the initiative a success. In the private sector, internships function along the same basis. The idea behind volunteerism is to provide practical hands on skills, business know how, industry insights, professional environment experience and more to young apprentice. It can be a huge learning experience for volunteers. Businesses also profit from the free labor. With good management and sound policies – required investment on the part of the businesses, volunteer contributions can be very meaningful and useful.

Cheers!

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Permalink Reply by Wangchuk Chungyalpa on January 14, 2009 at 11:17pm

To make Telecentres more professional, I think Telecentres need to be operated as a business unit. The following are key areas that requires business strategy.
1. Organizational structure – a well defined business model with clearly defined roles and responsibilities of the board members, Chief Executive, Upper and middle level management and operating staff. The structure should clearly define the roles of the various departments.
2. Products / Services offered – based on industry, market analysis and survey, Telecentres should than offer products and services. Most importantly, products and services should be differentiated into those that can provide immediate returns and those that will provide returns in the long run.
3. Marketing – requires careful analysis and understanding of the target segment needs. Based on those, marketing campaigns can be initiated to attract new customers and retain existing customers and build a brand name and a corporate image.
4. Information Technology / Information systems – A information system is a must for any organization to record daily operations – sales, revenues, expenses – essentially all book keeping functions.

In all the above areas, Telecentres need to develop the following:
* Set of objectives – the objectives can cut across departments and functions.
* Operational / functional strategy to achieve the above objectives
* Implementation and execution of the strategy and
* Monitoring and feedback mechanism.

Attached is a document that I wrote as a guideline for entrepreneurs interested in starting a internet café venture. The document provides a much more in-depth information and explanation on the above processes, including analysis and strategy development tools for serious entrepreneurs. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.

Attachments:

• InternetCafeGuide.pdf, 362 KB

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Permalink Reply by Niranjan Meegammana on January 15, 2009 at 5:13am

Hi Wangchuk
With reference to Nenasala Telecenters in Sri Lanka, This model seems quite advanced, We are talking about rural villages, small temples, two or threei volunteers run telecenters setup with government subsidy.

So we need to look at professionalism in different angle.

I think we should get started by making the prime defnitions of
1. Who is a telecenter operator ?
2, What professional skills they should have ?
3. How such skills can be developped and measured etc ?

any ideas ?

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Permalink Reply by Marco Figueiredo on January 16, 2009 at 3:45pm

Great discussion. In Brazil, I proposed the technical schools to provide a track on telecenter management. The Brazilian government maintains a network of federal subisidized technology schools. They are free but require one to pass a selection test. A telecenter management track could leverage on current technology courses and complement with business and social organization skills building. The problem is how you train people for a market that is in its infancy? There needs to be a concerted effort to grow the number of telecenters as the first group of students are graduating. I proposed a network of 100,000 telecenters in Brazil, combining private, NGO and government owned units. If one envisions a future market, then it gets easier to start building the policies and actions to address the growth of that market.

I would hate to call telecenters an industry as they are a tool to help us move most people from the industrial to the information age, so calling it an industry is a paradox, if not an aberration, but I fully understand Wangchuk's point.

Professionalization of telecenter operators is a must. In the Reverse Franchising Telecenter model, I address that need in the same way most franchise companies do, they create training materials for the franchisees that includes every element of the business. I further propose that most training be provided online, and allow those already savvy Internet users to become the first telecenter professionals. However, one can only train for what is known in the operation of the business. That is why it is important to have a technology package already established, otherwise the training is limited to skills that may or may not be utilized, like the example nicely shared by Wangchuk. The problem is that every situation is going to be a little different and not quite predictable. There should be some effort of standardization of telecenter packages that include training.

Concluding, I believe the elements of the franchise model can be applied to any telecenter operation, be it government, non-profit or for-profit. And if we all agree in standardizing the elements of the package, then no matter the type of organization, we can start building the elements collaboratively, in an open source model.

Always think of a telecenter as a network of telecenters. A single telecenter alone can hardly be self sustainable. So when we think of a solution for a telecenter, we have to also think how it applies to the network of telecenters. That's why I never talk of telecenter sustainability in terms of a single telecenter. We have a network of 5 rural telecenters in Brazil in communities of less than 1000 people. The whole idea is to use this pilot project to learn from the individual telecenter initiatives while understanding the needs of the network. The Reverse Franchising Telecenter model applies perfectly even to the rural telecenter network in Brazil, but the costs to create the integrated packages are beyond the resources of the network organization, so we can't grow. Recently, the Brazilian government started offering to pay salaries of telecenter operators in an attempt to keep community telecenters running. It does not solve the problem. I would rather see the government investing in creating training and technology packages to improve the telecenter eco-system...

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Permalink Reply by Shipra Sharma on January 19, 2009 at 11:48am

Good discussion and some great ideas here!
In this context I want to share a news that appeared on this site a couple of weeks ago. This is about a diploma program in telecentre management. More information about this program is available at: http://telecentrecommunity.ning.com/profiles/blogs/telecentreorg-an....
I think this is a good step towards professionalising telecentre operators.

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Permalink Reply by Niranjan Meegammana on January 19, 2009 at 1:16pm

Dear Shipra
This is interesting . We also have started a research project called e3 on Telecenter Sustainability.
There about 90 Telecenter operators ( a good mix) from 60 Telecenters working with us. Based on our

One of the objectives we have is to develop a Carricullum for Telecenter Operators/Managers
to qualify working Telecenter Operators/managers

Our key questions were

1. why they need to be quafied ?
2. on what criteria do we qualify them?
3. who will make them qualify ?
4. How we will teach them ?
5. What competence level and should they reach ?
6. How we will test and certify them ?

To find out we tudied what problems they face every day ?
They are three foldrsn
Teachnical Issues.
Managerial Issues.
Community issues.

Finally we were able to develop a brief carricullam that they shiuld go through
Covering ICT, Enterprunership & Community Development

Our obstacles are mainly
content in local language
reaching them localy
means pf knowledge transfer
Testing of skills

We have been researching last six months on these questions
and have aveiry interesting findings
We have started developing a course on
"Telecenter Operations and e Services Management"

on going basis, still it's very informal and completed first semaster of
but results are satisfactory
we plan to complete the first batch in November 2009

With what we have learned Training Telecenter Opeatrators require at least one Year, as they
have to practice what they learn. We also need to develop good content taking local context i nto operation. E learning is the best form for Telecenter Operator Training.Still it needs face to face teaching and knowledge sharing sessions.

We still lack enough R & D in these areas.
Actually these areas serve as infrastructure for professionalizing Telecenter Operators.
Yet much to EXPLORE


Niranjan Meegammana

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Permalink Reply by Francis Mwathi on January 20, 2009 at 3:20am

Training of Telecentre managers/Operators is very important. There is no particular qualifications required for one to become a Telecentre manager. The willingness to help the community is mainly what makes one become a Telecentre manager. This as a result means that Telecentre managers have varying levels of education which can be sited as one of the reasons why some telecentres perform better than others.

A training program for Telecentre managers would therefore bring them at par with the standards required in administering any Telecentre (read entreprise). They will be exposed to a uniform curriculum imparted by experts of the different modules. All these will induce professionalism and the ability to identify activities that will enable his or her Telecentre become sustainable.

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Permalink Reply by Niranjan Meegammana on January 20, 2009 at 12:55pm

Dear Francis
I am in agreement with you on eligibility to become a Telecenter Operator. Actually it's a volunteer job anyone can take, how ever anyone taking such a responsibility should develop certain set of skills, most skills are quite global and some skills could be locally relevent.

The skills they have can help Telcenter to be more usefull to the community. Here we are talking Telecenter 2.0 model wh ich goes beyond access to ICTs and communication services. Telecenters now begin to expand to provide economic, education and many other lively services and also becoming connected networks to provide networked services.
More than the ICT aspect of Telecenters I see their usefullness in levelling the society by empowering the grass roots, reaching the under served etc.

One issue we have is Telecenter Operators do not treat their work as a new profession, which need some special skills and know how.

As an example someone could be highly skilled programmer/software engineer , unleses he or she studies basics of community development , the software they develop may not be useful to grass roots. Similarly a Telecenter Operator having good ICT skills, but with out community skills could not be able to mobulize the community to use ICTs to develop themselves.

One major problem in Telecenter Sustainability is small turn around of staff, retaining them is a major concern. If Telecenters to grow to something big we need to retain the people who make things happen at Telecenters.

Will telecenters develop if we have to train new people every six months ?
This is the simpleset reason we need to professionalize the telecenter movement.

The challnage is how do we do it still keeping the essence of Telecenters as it is?

Can a Volunteer become a Professional ?

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Permalink Reply by Shipra Sharma on January 21, 2009 at 8:46am

Dear Niranjan,
The project mentioned by you sounds good and it has also shown results to some extent.
telecentre.org also did a similar pilot project in India called the Training Commons (2005-07) during the managership of Mark Surman. It aimed to prepare common curriculum for training telecentre managers in a peer assist and participatory mode. Interestingly, the study also identified somewhat similar areas for training. These were community development, infomediary, entrepreneurial, communication and marketing skills. I did a case study on its formative or processual aspects.
The case study showcased several learnings in the area of common content development. It also introduced me to the variety within the telecentre operators' community. Apart from gender, age and cultural variations, they were so diffrent from each other in terms of their educational attainments as well. While some organisations pursuing the social entrepreneurial model clearly specified the minimum educational qualifications, some others following the community model had other criteria for selecting the telecentre operators, like leadership qualities.
This variation in terms of their educational attainments posed a challenge in keeping the content of the modules simple so that everyone can understand it. The telecentre operators I interviewed also approved of simple and participatory training incorporating techniques like role play. So, it had to be face to face for the majority of them.
Another major challenge was to decide the content of the modules. Because telecentre is a distinct enterprise and there were no curriculum for reference, the content writers (who were telecentre operators' training coordinators in their respective organisations) had to rely on their own ground experience most of the time.

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Permalink Reply by Niranjan Meegammana on January 21, 2009 at 12:53pm

Dear Shipra
This sounds great, I usually like piloting before we design anything. Your work will definitely help us and vise versa. As a part of our course development, I have started fentollowing R & D activities

1. Defning a course modules under three themes (ICT, Enterprunership & Community Development)
2. creating content for workshops & self learning
3. Training Telecenter Operators while testing the modules
4. Monitoring and Evalution of Telecenters for progress

I have started writing a Handbook for Nensala Telecenters (actually I am editing, adopting and adding to current work by many people on the subject) , We need to get it into locaval context with local case studies and examples.

We need to have it in English, Sinhalta & Tamil to make an impact.
Finally we have to get everything online for enabling e Learning
Since grass root e Learning is one of my main interests, this goal is realastic.

I am quite keen to learn from some of your experiences, specially training techniques as well as sharable content that can be adopted.

I think this is an area we can work together.
I would like to study more on

Training Commons (2005-07) Project,
probably we can adopt it to Sri Lanka integrated with our work.
If we are able to get a project initiated the whole purpose of telecentre.otg coulde be full filled.

Regards
Niranjan

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Permalink Reply by Shipra Sharma on January 22, 2009 at 11:16am

Dear Niranjan,
For your reference I am attaching two files: one on the case study on Training Commons detailing the process adopted by this project to create common content and the challenges encountered therein. The other one is the Training Commons manuals prepared through this effort. These have to be appreciated in the light of being the first consolidated effort to create manuals for training telecentre operators. They were launched in March last year on a pilot basis to be used by telecentre training coordinators and to invite suggestions to further improve them.

Attachments:

• Mission 2007 Training Commons Draft Version 2 Shipra.doc, 442 KB
• Mission 2007 TC tele-manuals.pdf, 5.3 MB

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Permalink Reply by Niranjan Meegammana on January 22, 2009 at 12:34pm

Thanks Shipra
Thease will be much useful as early work
I have met Mark Surman at GK3 Malaysia last year, a really good advisor/mentor and a role model, He has done tremendous work to bring people together. l
He is admired by Many Telecenter operators in Sri Lanka.

I briefly scanned through h the documents, lot of effort has gone in, I like the integration of visual elements, ICTA has a five day course for Telecenter Start ups, This course quite similar.

In our case we are working with operators who have 1- 3 year experience in telecenters. Their issue is sustaining them self without government assistance. So they need to learn number of skills to become professional.

When we starated the Assignment we did a needs assesment of 60 Telecenters.
The carriculam was based on these needs. Another need is that we want to align the course to the National Vocational Qualifications which has several levels certificate, diploma and advanced diploma. We like the advanced diploam which include on the job training aspect. As well as the crowd we have are quite intelligent , all passed Advanced Level, some are external undergraduates.

Regards
Niranjan

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