Noticia(s) 32 de 193

Global leaders come together to support telecentre project

IDRC Photo: Nancy Lessard

2009-03

Since 2000, thousands of rural entrepreneurs in India have been trained to run Internet kiosks through the Drishtee project, an information and communication technology social enterprise. Drishtee’s distribution network of Internet kiosks across India brings services such as computer training, micro-finance, and e-commerce to more than 4 000 villages.

IDRC, through telecentre.org, supported Drishtee to study how urban-based jobs can be outsourced to rural areas through telecentres. The study found educated rural villagers could feasibly do a variety of outsourced tasks, such as translation and cataloguing.

“The study showed how Drishtee can make villagers into entrepreneurs in their own right,” said Basheerhamad Shadrach, senior program officer for telecentre.org.

Drishtee was recently chosen to be the focus of the 8th Global Young Leaders Program, which is organized by the Global Institute for Tomorrow (GIFT), an independent social venture think tank based in Hong Kong.

“Drishtee’s innovative approach and ability to leverage its vast distribution networks and experience of using local entrepreneurs has made Drishtee one of the more competitive and commercially viable social enterprises in India,” said Thomas Tang, GIFT’s executive director. “Furthermore, its approach has resulted in real income generation opportunities which are helping to retain much needed labour and talent in the rural economy.”

Identfying new business opportunities

As part of the program, a team of 19 international professionals, which included corporate executives, NGO representatives, and students from leading Asian business schools, worked with Drishtee to identify new business opportunities for the enterprise.

The team designed an ambitious business plan that includes setting up centres in villages to train rural people, particularly women, to deliver services that would be competitive with urban centres. GIFT will now propose the business plan to potential investors in the hopes of making the plan a reality.

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