As the need for a clear common vision grows in telecentre eco-sys-tem, the network lea-ders in East African countries met between 18th and 22nd February 2008 at UgaBYTES, Uganda. The objective of the meeting was to discuss about the staff exchange programme and other similar issues at regional level.

The gathering was the first of its kind to focus specifically on regional network programme harmonisation. The staff exchange programme is part of the telecentre.org programme, recommended in the telecentre global survey of 2005. The meeting brought national network representatives from Kenya's KenTel, Tanzania's Tanzania Telecentre Network, Burundi's Burundi Community Telecentre Network and Rwanda's Rwanda Telecentre Network to openly share, learn and re-think the path of the region's telecentre eco-system. The concept has also been discussed at all the four East Africa Telecentre Leaders Forums (EATLF) before its implementation.

The programme will help the region to build networks beyond leadership, enthusiasm and motivation. Focusing at collaborative success and value innovations for strengthening the community, the event emphasised:

• mainstreaming management and operation
• strategic planning and budgeting
• start up high value activities
• envision 'small investment; big impact' strategy.

The five day programme focused on discussions involving national network legislation and collaborative operation, establishment of a strong regional on-line telecentre eco-system, strategic community engagement, decentralising and strengthening mailing lists and websites and developing internal revenue generation business ideas. Other issues that were discussed include a regional telecentre academy, staff exchange programme management and partnership issues within the region.

Participants articulated their expect-ations at both national networks and the broader region that mapped out the layout of the discussions.

The event started with an overview of current status of individual national networks in the region. Updates from Kenya Network of Telecentres (KenTel), Tanzania Telecentre Network (TTN), Rwanda Telecentre Network (RTN) and Burundi Community Telecentre Network (BCTN) were presented and discussed. UgaBYTES presented its historical growth trends and current status. It allowed participants to understand and learn from the earlier challenges.

Building a strong regional on-line eco-system

East African network leaders resolved to build a strong on-line telecentre community through improving on-line knowledge sharing platform in the region. During the second part of the discussions on the first day, the network leaders agreed to have national mailing lists alongside the UgaBYTES mailing list which is so far looked at as a global mailing list. The national mailing lists will help to cover issues of language and will facilitate discussion of challenges at a national level. The network leaders also agreed to have websites for their networks and improve the look and feel of those already existing by making them user friendly, interactive and dynamic. RTN and Kentel websites will be improved to allow users to submit content through blogs.

e-Community engagement plan

During the gathering, leaders reviewed and improved a community engagement plan that was also adapted as the working guidelines for strengthening the region's telecentre eco-system. The three thematic based plan clearly states what needs to be done, the target audience, delivery strategy, key outcomes, time line and the consumable resources to deliver the plan. It underscores community awareness and sensitisation, research and documentation, dissemination and sharing as key components to  stimulate and energise the eco-system. The plan also highlighted the incentive mechanisms for active practitioners. Once implementation starts, the engagement plan will be a major cornerstone for telecentre research, knowledge management and sharing.

The BYTES for Development Award (B4DA)

It was conceived as an effort to reward practitioners who propagate knowledge sharing. The incentive mechanism is an annual award that will be going to the best: researcher, blogger, trainer and the outstanding story. The award recognises stars of the telecentre community in the areas of research, knowledge sharing and sustainability in the East and Central African region. The winners under best blogger, best researcher and trainer will receive:

• A laptop for each of the winners except for the outstanding story
• A plaque that has logos of all involved networks and institutions

A package of the most recent telecentre publications

Special mention for a year during EATLF and global events organised by partners and in all the telecentre publications.
The jury will look into the possibility of providing wireless equipment along with a laptop in future.

Regional social enterprise discussions

The history of telecentres is seen to depend on donors and governments for financial survival. But this is a non growing support. It has declined over the last 7 years. Since 2003, funding has changed to support networks and knowledge hubs that promise to ensure a 360 degree survival to telecentres. Mapping donor support in this sector though and elsewhere, networks will soon run out of funding, if they can not do what they promise to do.

The above notion with the effort of UgaBYTES and the staff exchange programme called for re-thinking telecentre survival and even foster implementation strategies of these thoughts at East and Central African regional level. The Social Enterprise Team (SET) at UgaBYTES closely lead the discussions. It was guided by the common vision of achieving 60 percent financial sustainability at network and telecentre level by 2009.

During the discussion, the leaders brainstormed on potential business concepts for collaborative engagement

in future. Each network leader gave the status of the network as far as social enterprise is concerned. This included what activities the network is/can undertake now or in future to ensure sustainability system.

Resolutions

• All the financial transactions will be done through banks
• Start-up grants should be sourced especially for viable business ventures
• Qualified personnel be solicited to manage the system
• Seek expertise from franchise model for finalization of the remittance system and the business concepts
• Articulate properly the motive of social enterprising
• The UgaBYTES social enterprise team to support regional efforts
• UgaBYTES in collaboration with national network to seek for volunteers in the domain of business.

It was noted that the interest of social enterprise is to generate revenue for sustainability purposes by ploughing back profits into various business ventures. The most immediate reason may seem to be profit making, however it is further than that. For example, expanding and providing ICTs at a larger level than the current operations, and this should be emphasised.

Key activities timeline

• Mid-March: There is a need to build highly skilled team to work on the social enterprise team at UgaBYTES. There should be contact persons at all networks, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi who will work closely with the UgaBYTES SET team
• Documentation process: A private wiki has been put in place for networks social enterprise teams to use as a centralised knowledge exchange area.
• There will be face to face and on-line meetings for the social enterprise teams in the region. The on-line meetings will take place on the same platform and time as the content facilitators' meeting
• Use of volunteers to work on the social enterprise. After articulating the required skills, networks will contribute towards accommodation and food of volunteers, from their respective countries. Foreign volunteers will be encouraged to participate. Local and international volunteers will be equally encouraged to participate
• Tap skills of people who have worked or working in franchise business, may not be academia
• The social enterprise team and content facilitators will work closely to ensure effective documentation
• Deadline for development of business concepts into the wiki from all networks is 30th April 2008.

The regional telecentre academy

During the discussion on telecentre academy, network leaders dreamed and visioned the academy they want for the East African region. They also talked about what needs to be done before implementation of the academy, the role of UgaBYTES at regional level and that of the national telecentre networks, how certification will be done, who else needs to be involved for the academy to happen between three and four months time.

The network leaders agreed that the telecentre academy is both a capacity building and sustainability programme. Since free services are not fully appreciated by the community, telecentre network members concurred that the services should carry a cost. They agreed to solicit for and provide scholarships to people who can not pay the minimal fee but are crucial in the network.

Key activities timeline

As a follow up strategy for the resolutions, it was agreed that:

• An on-line wiki will be developed to capture the emerging issues of telecentre academy
• UgaBYTES and telecentre.org academy team will provide a training needs assessment guideline for the region by the end of March
• National networks will nominate an academy contact person by 31st March who will join the needs assessment team
• Training needs assessment for the region to be completed by the end of April with the recommendations
• Follow up with Pete Cranston and Basheerhamad Shadrach of telecentre.org.
• By the end of May, the structure of the academy will be in place and training and examination centres be gazetted
• Between May and June: the curriculum will be developed by the regional team together with the UgaBYTES and telecentre.org support
• The academy will be launched on 1st July with at least one module as informed by the training needs assessment recommendations.

Network and telecentre staff exchange

Participants  underscored the need to have staff exchange both at national and regional level. The programme was resolved to target telecentre owners, telecentre staff and network leaders. It was recommended that the regional network leaders exchange has to be done on an annual basis to the review networking progress.

Coordination of the regional exchange programme will be done by UgaBYTES in collaboration with national networks. National networks will choose the participants for staff exchange, what are the potential placement telecentre, what they want to gain and UgaBYTES will aggregate the information to coordinate the process of match making of exchanges with right placement. However, the coordination of the national exchange programmes will be done by  the national networks leadership, which will also be responsible for blogging and adding the information on the staff exchange wiki.

The team resolved to use a combination of report back tools. It adapted the recommendations provided in the telecentre.org network support services.

Peer to peer support: before, during and after the programme

It was agreed that peer to peer support should be a continuous process. There needs to be a centralised return point for all people participating in the staff exchange at either national or regional level to share experiences which feed

into the staff exchange beneficiaries assessment. Network leaders noted that it is important to have the conference call or interact on-line before the programme so that the beneficiaries get a picture of where they are going and the expectations  from them.

Regional partnership

Network leaders discussed and mainstreamed the roles of national networks and UgaBYTES within the regional eco-system. The purpose of the discussion was to harmonise the telecentres movement in the region while at the same time shape out the future of the success. The discussion mapped out the region's telecentre ecosystem structure.

Global connection

The network leaders were joined by Meddie Mayanja and Basheerhamad Shadrach, Senior Programme Officers of telecentre.org in a teleconference. The leaders provided feedback on the discussions especially on the telecentre academy and the status of networks in the region.   The telecentre.org team committed to support the regional efforts especially if networks can formally register.

According to Shaddy, telecentre.org will provide its human resources, finances and expertise to support good initiatives like the telecentre academy while Meddie assured the networks that after registration they can benefit from the network capacity building fund at IDRC. Besides the work related issues, stronger relations were made between participants through sharing and deepening their understanding of each others' communities.