Document(s) 3 of 10

1.1 Purpose of these guidelines

The guidelines were developed in collaboration with research groups participating in the Acacia Telecentre Research Network (ATRN). Many of these groups are already actively engaged in evaluating pilot telecentre projects.²

The approach taken in the guidelines is based on four premises:

The stakeholders’ viewpoints and needs are important — It is important for evaluators to take account of the experience of community telecentres from the point of view of the stakeholders at three levels: the local (within African communities), the national (especially the agencies experimenting with or implementing community telecentres) and the international (where public- and private-sector donors are taking more interest in funding telecentre projects). The “telecentre horse” is out of the gate and is in danger of running ahead of any adequate understanding of how to ensure the financial sustainability of the telecentres and maximize their benefits. It is therefore critical that the information needs of these various stakeholders guide the evaluation.

The stakeholders should be involved — The evaluation should be as participatory and locally based as possible and should involve research institutions in Africa, local-community organizations, and telecentre management and staff. The Acacia Initiative is committed to a process of continuous feedback and learning involving all stakeholders, especially at the local and national levels, so that participation and feedback become part of a learning system. This has implications for how evaluations are conducted.

Telecentre evaluations should be comparable — Using common research frames, instruments, and indicators will help researchers compare the experiences of diverse community-telecentre programs. This does not mean uniformity, which can bludgeon local issues and nuances. It means comparability of results through the inclusion of a few core indicators, in addition to those reflecting local concerns. Strengthening comparability across evaluations of pilot telecentre projects in Africa is important because in most countries the number of telecentres in the pilot phase is small and therefore, without an international cross-sectional sampling frame, evaluation projects would be limited to individual case studies.

Baseline data should be collected and shared before it is too late — The guidelines have been developed with a sense of urgency: an increasing number of pilot telecentres are becoming operational before anyone has collected any real baseline data on the communities, and this will make any evaluation of their impacts and benefits more difficult.
 

A word of warning These guidelines are not designed to be a basic text on how to do project evaluation or on methods for conducting social surveys. Rather, they seek to review the main issues in making decisions on what to measure and how to measure it. They assume that the reader is already generally familiar with survey methods and evaluation or can access that information from standard texts, some of which are listed in the “Further reading” section of the bibliography.

1.2 Some key definitions

1.2.1 Telecentre

The earliest telecentres in Europe started before people had access to the Internet, but access to the Internet becomes important for telecentres once they progress beyond the status of the basic “phone-fax shop.” Successful community telecentres will eventually need to provide related services, such as user training, distance education, keyboard and business training, “job shops,” and community programs. Partly for this reason, some national programs locate their telecentres in existing institutions, such as libraries, schools, and chambers of commerce.

1.2.2 Monitoring, evaluation, and learning

The learning system is based on a series of feedback, or learning, loops between the stakeholders at various levels; this feedback provides the stakeholders with adequate and timely information to underpin their management, investment, or other decisions. With a learning-system approach, the research, evaluation, and monitoring teams are responsible for providing feedback to all stakeholders, especially those involved in local management and national-program direction, and for framing research questions to respond to the information needs of these stakeholders.

The Acacia Initiative addresses activities and issues in community telecentres at several levels:

Community or individual telecentre pilot projects;

National telecentre program and policy;

Regional and international comparisons of telecentre experience; and

Evaluation of the initiative with respect to its specific objectives for telecentres and its hypotheses on the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in promoting sustainable development in African communities.

1.3 The Evaluation and Learning System for Acacia

The emphasis on a continuous and interactive learning system in the Acacia Initiative is experimental. The aim is to use web-based electronic discussions (involving researchers and telecentre operators) to bring together community-based learning and more traditional research findings in a single, interactive framework and encourage communities to define their own needs for products, services, and content. Project communities are expected to eventually share ideas and resources with other communities; and researchers involved directly in the Acacia Initiative will use ATRN to share their ideas and research with other partners assessing community telecentres in Africa or in other parts of the world. These guidelines will play an integral role in that learning process.

² The Coordinator of the Evaluation and Learning System for Acacia, Dr Heather Hudson, provided helpful ideas and constructive comments throughout the process. Return

Document(s) 3 of 10