[Telecentres] New Bangladeshi Model of Telecenter

[Shahid Uddin Akbar]

KATALYST/Swisscontact, a project funded by DFID, SDC and SIDA is working in Bangladesh to promote the competetiveness of Small and Medium Enterprises of Bangladesh. Rural ICT is a new area of the project and we have come out with a new Business Model, basicaaly focusing to serve the businesses as well as rural communities.
   
  The evolution process of GHAT was little lengthy and we have gone through a systematic approach to develop the model. After 2 phases of market study, the research team developed the model, we invited expression of interest from the interested party who wants to invest and finally selected to operators based on their Business Plan and equity participation.
   
  This centers named GHAT (where people gather for transportation, mainly boat), and offering bundle of services. As the focus on business, we tried to concentrate to develop location & sector (business) specific contents in local language. At the same time some common services required by businesses. Also citizen services are being offered through the centers. The services are available both off-line and on-line.
   
  To ensure the commercial viability of the centers, training, desktop publications, internet and digital photo services. Rural people can ask for any new employment opportunity at local as well as national level or anyone can get the admission information for colleges & universities. 
   
  The 1st center launched on 20th December 2005 and 2 others are ready go operation. We have planned to replicate the model all over the country and want to see the model as Self sustaining. GHAT is purely operated by private sectors with holistic approach and as a development project,  K is supporting the content development, awareness building activities for the pilot phase of 18 months. 
   
  Due to strategic reason and KATALYST mandate of commercial sustainability, we are trying to keep the GHAT locations not to remote rural, where services may not very lucrative and affordable by the users. However, our experience shows that the rural people frequently visit this locations to market their product or any other social reasons. Additionally we are patronizing the Info-mediator’s role to reach the rural communities at deep rural areas.
   
  During the whole process, we experienced the critical challenges of content development, developing demand based & updated information and finally the delivery mechanism, some are to be resolved.
   
  We are assuming that once the model start working, more private sector investors will be interested to become as Franchisee of GHAT and soon will be replicated in other areas, in fact, we already received a no. of request from the investors. 
   
  The web version of GHAT is still under regular updates and we are expecting to see a good structure by the end of January 2006. The web is www.ghatbd.com
   
  For any further details please contact me.
   
  Thanks,
   
  Shahid Uddin Akbar
  ICT Consultant
  KATALYST/Swisscontact
  Bangladesh
  And 
  Coordinator
  ICT for Development Program Bangladesh (ICTDPB)
  Dhaka, Bangladesh  
   

			
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