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Recently the Fusion’s business Promotion Officer, Ms. Dilini Gunasekera, conducted a workshop for the SRTAC Village Information Centre (VIC) operators on conducting computer training course for the community through the VIC. Fusion’s Tele-Centre Family (TCF) program has prepared standard ICT course material for village Tele-centre operators to develop their ICT capacity. During the workshop Ms. Dilini presented necessary activities that should be followed by a Tele-centre operators to make their VICs more sustainable, ICT service oriented and profitable. Special attention was given regarding business planning and income, expense, and depreciation monitoring for the VICs. Ms. Dilini also provided Course materials to participants to initiate the following courses,1). Kids 1st Stage = Bronze level
2). Kids 2nd Stage = Silver level
3). Kids 3rd Stage = Gold level
4). Diploma in Computer Application
It was assessed that all VIC operators already had the capacity to start Kids courses in the village, but they are still unable to start Diploma in Computer Application. A decision was made to support interested VIC operators to train for the National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) Certificated in ICT courses conduct by National Apprenticeship and Industrial Training Authority (NAITA).
Noise at the Last Mile is the First fusion publication, synthesizing 4 research publications independantly carried out by multiple researchers on two ‘Virtual Villages’ s in rural Sri Lanka. The Virtual Village Project was another IDRC funded project implemeted by Sarvodaya. It was the first of it’s kind, sharing many lessons that one encounters when ICT reaches the grassroot communties. The document empasize, why rural community show reluctance at interaction with ICT tools provided at telecentres.
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The Project has started the initial planning meetings for the “SARVODAYA SAHANA” (SS) web portal with the SAHANA Open source software consultants. At the first few meetings the requirements of the project and applications needed to be customized were clarified. Then the customization applications were defined in detail to fit our requirement. Finally the Sarvodaya Sahana web portal functions were drafted.The web portal will have four Main functions. 1) SS will be a Disaster Management tool, where missing persons in disaster can be identified, located, and mapped, it will also coordinated volunteers and other agencies, disaster specifically, and location specifically. 2) Secondly it will have village person’s information data base that can be accessed by authorized persons. Information on the database will contain personal, livelihood, health, ethnic and poverty level information. Due to the sensitivity of these data access will be only granted to authorize persons. 3) The SS will have community Wikipedia, where the village tele-center workers and project staff can upload knowledge products, such as articles, progress reports, soft copies of posters, presentations, community videos/ audio documents, and photos for the public to view. This is will be a pioneering knowledge sharing model that will be developed for Sri Lanka through this project. 4) Finally the web portal will have a module, where monthly monitoring and research data will be stored and derived in to analysis graphs or diagrams for evaluation. This module will also have the capacity to store research work, papers written by the university students and consultants. SS can be viewed in Sinhalese, Tamil and English. The SS Disaster Management module, Research module and the community Wikipedia module in particular will be pioneering ICT models, showing how ICT can be used for future Community developmental and research activities in Sri Lanka.
The Sarvodaya Fusion Tele-Centre Family program -another IDRC funded ICT project- started working in collaborations with the VICs of the Strengthening Resilience in Tsunami Affected Communities (SRTAC) project from January 2008. The project has identified the need for a business plan for the VIC to become sustainable in the long run. Therefore the project is introducing a business model to the VICs, taking in to consideration generating income, profit making, and deprecations etc. The First basic introduction workshop on business models was done through the Fusions Tele centre Family project’s “I CAN” workshop last February 2008. This workshop helped the VIC workers to identify their business ideas, and strengths and weaknesses. In April 2008 they will participate in the “WE CAN” workshop where their capacity will be further strengthened on business planning and income generation.
"Building inner spiritual resilience is the primary coping mechanism to external disasters "
Dr A T Ariyaratne, Founder President, Sarvodaya
"Is small still beautiful? We think it is. In an increasingly divided and fragile world, Practical Action aims to demonstrate and advocate the sustainable use of technology to reduce poverty in developing countries" -PRACTICAL ACTION
