IndiaShop

FOOD has established an on-line supermarket that specialises in the sale of local products made by village crafts people. The FOOD staff advise producers on marketing, pricing and packaging and, so far, around 100 cottage industries are preparing to participate in this electronic market. The organisation is also experimenting with the concept of tele-marketing using the internet to bring IndiaShop to the notice of potential customers. Purchases are transacted through major credit card companies. A novel means of rewarding tele-marketeers that is being tested is to share with them the commission that the credit card companies charge. Tele-marketeers can operate from their own computers, and in their own time. The ordering system tracks the source of the order so that commissions are correctly assigned. Shortly after launching the service one village producer in a village called Kancheepuram sold a hand-embroidered silk sari which she had spent 60 days working on for US$1,100, far more than she would have earned by selling it to a shop in Madras. IndiaShop offers market outlets for indigenous craftspeople as well as marketing opportunities for marketeers who can work from any networked computer.

Education Software

FOOD has developed software for use by a teacher of a class of students learning the English language. The software teaches pronunciation by depicting letters of the alphabet whilst simultaneously playing back its correct pronunciation recorded by a native English speaker. English, which is highly regarded for job advancement, is rarely learned from a native speaker in India, leading to poor pronunciation. The software does not assume an individual user, but supports the teacher in class mode, enabling large numbers of students to benefit in a single sitting. It lessens the tedium for the teacher in the repetitive coaching necessary for correct pronunciation, whilst increasing the quality of the learning experience. The application has potential anywhere English is taught and where there is access to a multimedia computer.

Internet Kiosk

The Internet Kiosk concept is brokered by FOOD as a means of making e-mail available to anyone. Any individual can visit a kiosk, which is fitted with a telephone, and dictate an e-mail message and the address over the phone to the nearest telecentre. In some cases, voice mail is used by the telecentre in order to provide a 24-hour service. The kiosk operator charges a fee, usually around one rupee, and makes a profit on each message. The telecentre charges the kiosk and also dictates incoming e-mail messages back to the kiosk operator, who, in some cases, writes it out and delivers it to the receiver. E-mail is therefore available to anyone with access to an internet kiosk, and small operators can enter the telecentre business with a minimum investment. When the scheme began, around 50 telephone booth operators enrolled in it. However, the end-users seemed to find it difficult to adapt to voicing an e-mail message on a telephone. Many operators perceived that the users felt that it was not e-mail if there was no computer visible to them in the process. Consequently, traffic volumes did not achieve expectations, and of the 50 original subscribers, around 10 remain in the scheme, servicing only a handful of messages weekly. Despite these difficulties, the scheme is included here as a partial success with the apparent lesson that human factors play a critical role in technology adoption. The approach to diffusing access to ICTs still seems to carry potential if these factors can be successfully addressed.

Herb Gathering and Cultivation

The village of Thandarai in the Union Territory of Pondicherry formerly earned a living from the collection of snakes in the surrounding bush country and the sale of their skins. Environmentalists were alerted to the possible extinction of the local snake species. A UK NGO, Womankind Worldwide, discovered that the village inhabitants had considerable knowledge of the local herbs; one shepherd youngster could identify 360 separate species of herbs and knew how to use them to treat the sheep for a variety of ailments. The village established a telecentre and, with connectivity support from FOOD, used it to learn how to package and market the herbs that they found in the surrounding countryside. The village now has several buildings that contain the telecentre with a prodigious library on herbs and a burgeoning herbal processing centre. Around 300 women from the surrounding district are engaged in the herb preparation process, and there is a concerted effort under way to record the local knowledge about herbs, from which a book is being planned. The telecentre service was instrumental in sensitising the villagers to the value of their knowledge and in stimulating them towards using it as a means of obtaining their livelihood.

FOOD

The Group characterised the Foundation for Occupational Development as a Value-Added ISP. It sub-leases internet access to qualifying organisations and assists those organisations in making effective use of it, in ways that are consistent with FOOD's development philosophy. The concept appears as a novel form of NGO in the field of communications for development and it is differentiated from both ISPs and from cybercafes by the value-added component. The implementation of the concept is to be complimented, demonstrating as it does, considerable creativity and flare as well as managerial and technical acumen.

One aspect of merit is that FOOD's operations have built-in sustainability, due, probably to the entrepreneurial approach adopted by the organisation. The Group characterised the head of FOOD as a "venture socialist", as a way of describing the organisation's business-like approach to its mission of creating employment opportunities through the inventive deployment of contemporary ICTs among communities that possess few other technologies. It was evident to the Group that the personal relationships that had been engendered between FOOD and its clients contributed significantly to the capacity building and the sustainability of their operations. The Group felt that it had come upon a rare example of sustainable development communications that offered a model capable of being replicated in other, and wider, contexts.

As a caveat to the foregoing, the Group observed that the creative dynamism of FOOD's founder, as well as the uncommon combination of technical savvy and proactive flare in the creation of content, might generate problems of succession in FOOD itself, and that it also represented a challenge to replication efforts. Such individuals are hard to come by; presenting something of a threat to efforts aimed at promoting a wider model of implementing development communications. A final caution relates to the coming direction of technological development, which of course undermines all ICT implementations. Much of what FOOD represents technologically and financially has been carefully crafted around a specific set of communications technologies and regulations. Significant changes to both are foreseeable, yet the direction of such change is highly uncertain. How FOOD is likely to be affected by such changes will remain unclear until they occur and the organisation remains vulnerable as a result of such uncertainty.

Lessons Learned

The most significant lesson learned from the experiences with FOOD relate to the business-like approach it adopts towards its operations, which appear to have the effect of building in sustainability right from the start. The organisation's entrepreneurial approach to development has the apparent effect of incorporating sustainability as an objective from the very beginning of any initiative, in much the same way as a businessman targets profits. Given the premium on sustainability in development, and the urgent need to mobilise mechanisms that are capable of sustaining the beneficial impacts of ICTs in development, FOOD seems to have a valuable lesson here for the entire telecentre movement.