|
With the shift in the development paradigm the current global emphasis is on market economy. In a market economy framework access to information is crucial in terms of having access to market and getting price advantage in the production process. Unfortunately, there is no separate market for producers of goods and services who belong to the poverty groups. Access to information, however, may drastically change the situation in favour of these producers within and for a country in the global context. Accessing ICT-carried information requires a lot of overt resources including a telecommunications infrastructure to provide network access, an electrical infrastructure, existence of a certain degree of computational skills, provision for training, literacy skills and money. The poverty groups simply do not have these resources. The main objective of the research project is to contribute to the improvement of the rural livelihoods through better access to information. This will be done specifically through understanding and identifying information needs for the rural livelihoods from supply and demand perspectives and through assessing the effectiveness of current information delivery channels for their improvement. The project through assessing the effectiveness of new delivery channels by developing the taxonomy of contents and experimenting their appropriateness and suitability in order to develop an alternative business model with Information Intermediary Concept for improving access to information for rural livelihood. The project as a first phase of full cycle research on access to information for improvement of rural livelihood through viable information services has identified initially the information needs of the poor through participatory research methodology. Based on the information needs a web portal www.pallitathya.org has been developed with eight areas : agriculture, market information, education, human rights, legal support, health care, awareness building and employment. Information needs identified from the poor of 5 selected villages across the country were then presented before 8 seminars participated by the resource persons of the respective areas mainly for (a) improving the contents of the respective areas, (b) establishing collaboration with supporting organisations, and (c) validation. The research found that the availability of content in local language is most crucial component for successful implementation of information services for the poor. The study confirmed the hypothesis that information can be delivered through ICT channels to strengthen the existing information delivery channels. For access to information the ICTs add some additional but strong channels, without ignoring the existing channels. The study again proved that the synergy of web-based content is enormous. Once the content is developed for delivery through information centre, other user groups can borrow the same content across the country. The components of the next phase research will be : (i) organising a village level information centre for testing the business model to experiment the financial and economic viability of the centre; (ii) to strengthen the content research and development; (iii) to set up a network of institutions for specialised content development for each area; (iv) to set up several teams for providing online support to the information centre in meeting day-to-day information needs of the villagers, which are yet not available in the web portal and will not possible to provide through portal.
|
