[Telecentres] what are your favorite telecentre initiatives?

[Cyrille Simard]

Hi Andy,

I take a few seconds to answer to your request...

One initiatives I like very much is the RUNetwork of agricultural 
telecentres (www.runetwork.de) that were established mainly in Africa 
and the Carribbean with the help of the Central for Agricultural 
documentation and information of Germany (www.zadi.de).

What I like about this initiative could be sum this way :

1) Focus on information as a development tool rather than technology;
2) An initiative that deals with real needs in rural Africa, namely 
agriculture;
3) A practical problem solving approach to agricultural problems via a 
quite innovative "Question and Answer System - QAS" .

I had the opportunity to work with one RUNetwork in Dassa (Bénin) and 
witnessed the impact on daily lives of the population. One interesting 
thing also is that the manager built a little interface between its QAS 
and a database of farmers cell phone numbers so that answers were not 
only accessible via the Web site but also via their personal phones.

hope this might be of some help to you

regards

cyrille