Information and Communication Flows through Community Multimedia Centers: Perspectives from Mozambican Communities

Abstract

Community Multimedia Centres (CMCs) are considered by initiating agencies as instruments able to inform, entertain and educate the population, as well as to offering them a voice into the knowledge society and to public initiatives.This article presents a quali-quantitative content analysis of 230 interviews held with staff members, users of the venues, people of the community who listen to their radio component but do not use their telecentres, and community members not using CMCs. The sample includes 10 CMCs around Mozambique. The purpose of the study is to investigate the perception of local communities of inbound, outbound, and shared information and communication flows connected to CMCs.Results highlight how CMCs are perceived as inbound information enablers, mostly by means of their community radio component, and as means to share information and communication within the communities' boundaries. Yet, CMCs still do not appear to be widely recognized as participation means to a reality that transcend the communities' physical borders.Keywords: telecentres, community radios, community multimedia centres, Mozambique, qualitative research, social representations. IntroductionCommunity Multimedia Centres (CMCs) are community-based public access venues (PAV) that combine a community radio with a telecentre. Their primary aim is to foster equitable access to information and knowledge for development, reduce the digital divide, promote social inclusion and civil participation, and promote the circulation of content that supports communities in improving their daily life conditions (Creech, 2006). The official documents of the model of CMCs emphasize the dimensions of information and communication among its grounding aspects, and underline how information and communication should be catalysed and reinforced by the synergy among the two components of the radio and the telecentre (UNESCO, 2004). Through CMCs, local community members can access and use a number of different Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as computers, the Internet, digital libraries, fax, photocopy machines, etc., and can listen and participate in a local radio station that is managed by local people and broadcasts community relevant information in native and national languages. Section 3 presents the adopted research design, while Section 4 presents and discusses the research results. Implications for CMCs sustainability and for further advancement in the research area of PAVs are drawn in Section 5. Social Representations: A Communication PerspectiveIn this article, information and communication are considered in their different typologies of acquired, transmittable, and sharable flows, according to (i) the location of the sender of the message (inside or outside the community); and (ii) the direction of the message in relation to the local community (within or across its boundaries). This approach is inspired by the work of Heeks (2002), who suggested an informationcentred perspective, adopted an information chain approach t...

A holistic decolonial lens for library and information studies

“…Scholars have also highlighted how these knowledge-transfers from the North to different contexts in the South only very rarely produce long-term sustainable results (Heeks, 2010;Unwin, 2009), and how only participation of local communities and consideration of local dynamics could ensure research and development projects to succeed (Brunello, 2015;Roche, 2008). Thus, libraries have been addressed as spaces for community participation and production of local content (Nwalo, 2000;Sey et al, 2013;Vannini et al, 2013), while participatory methods have been adopted to promote community empowerment (Bentley et al, 2017;David et al, 2013;Vannini et al, 2015). However, the field seems to have been motivated mostly by sustainability issues than by dismantling the structural colonial legacies that produced these imbalances in the first place (Irani et al, 2010;Jimenez & Roberts, 2019).…”

“…Thus, libraries have been addressed as spaces for community participation and production of local content (Nwalo, 2000; Sey et al. , 2013; Vannini et al. , 2013), while participatory methods have been adopted to promote community empowerment (Bentley et al.…”

Using Photo‐elicitation to Explore Social Representations of Community Multimedia Centers in Mozambique

“…Staff, and especially users, are concerned with the appearance of the venues, which should look good, clean, and in order. It emerges an underlying idea that the physical conditions of CMCs should be worth of their importance as community relevant centers (to this respect, see also: Vannini et al, 2015), and should provide people working there and people using their facilities with a comfortable place. These outcomes are partly in line with the study of Gómez & Gould (2010) about the influence of the "cool factor" in accessing PAVs, made attractive by a set of subjective perceptions that include unrestricted Internet access, friendly and reliable operators, and a the presence of a comfortable space allowing social interaction.…”

“…The methodological and the theoretical underpinnings at the basis of this study are quite unexplored in the domain of ICT4D, and brought several assets to this research. On the one hand, the theory of social representations confirmed it can be used to address the concerns raised by ICT4D scholars, who advocate for a more preponderant inclusion of contextual elements and local voices in ICT4D research (Rega et al, 2013;Vannini et al, 2015). On the other hand, participatory photo-elicitation proved to be a useful method to gain insights on social meanings in a development context, to uncover elements otherwise not accessible by researchers, and to empower and foster reflection on local stakeholders.…”

The Influence of Intangible (‘Soft’) Constructs on the Outcome of Community ICT Initiatives in Ghana: A Gap Archetype Analysis

“…The dominant stream has solely focused on hard constructs (also referred to as quantifiable or tangible constructs). Such studies have thus far considered concepts such as service quality (chigona, 2007;Vannini et al, 2013), adoption of initiatives (Vannini, 2015), skills level and training (Madon, 2005a;Dada, 2006), functionality of centres (Attwood, 2013), cost-benefit analysis (Kumar, 2004;Ali and Bailur, 2007), system usage (Mtega, 2009;Mbatha, 2015), user satisfaction (Hossain, 2015), technical barriers (Jacobs and Herselman, 2004) and information needs (Lwoga, 2010). Nonetheless, it has been noted that further evaluations of telecenters are required (Madon et al, 2009).…”