The magic bullet for rural development? Exploring the impacts of community telecenters in Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper explores the impacts of Bangladesh’s Union Digital Centers (UDCs) as government information and service delivery hubs in rural areas. Drawing on user-surveys and semi-structured individual interviews it demonstrates that the UDCs have produced generally positive yet modest impacts on governance of service delivery. It shows that the UDCs are at an early stage of development, and that they offer only a limited set of services. While they helped extend ICT-enabled services to sections of population that would otherwise have missed them, the UDCs do not have much to do with rural livelihoods and empowerment of the poor and marginalized groups. These findings point to current inadequacies and pitfalls of the UDC approach to development. We argue that enhanced viability and effectiveness of the UDC experiment would warrant embedding more value-added governmental services and further strengthening of their capacity, mandate, and connectivity with government agencies at various levels, among others.

Identifying potential barriers to community participation and use of telecentres: A Survey-based Study

“…Salazar (2007), Quaglione (2020), and Forge and Vu (2020) point out that the high level of mobile handset subscriptions has not translated into an increase in the use of mobile phones for internet access due to the high cost of internet-capable handsets. Harris (2007a) and Siddiquee and Faroqi (2022) developed the argument further, indicating that mobile phones cannot offer the community development aspect afforded by telecentres. However, mobile phones have the potential to provide complementary services.…”

Bridging the rural digital divide: avoiding the user churn of rural public digital cultural services

“…It is critical to focus on RPDCS's function of “protecting information equity” to narrow the rural digital divide (Xiao and Ye, 2020). However, Siddiquee and Faroqi (2021) discovered that Bangladesh's digital centres (centres for information and service delivery in rural areas) were ineffective in closing the rural digital divide due to local users' negative attitudes toward such information services.…”

“…Given RPDCS's role in bridging the digital divide, it is critical to systematically investigate how rural public cultural institutions can help bridge the rural digital divide while avoiding UC. The majority of research, however, has concentrated on the development of digital hardware and software in rural areas (Siddiquee and Faroqi, 2021;Abdullah, 2015) and the impact of the urban-rural digital divide (Chao and Yu, 2016;Cruz-Jesus et al, 2018). Prior research on issues, such as the degree of reliable information infrastructure, access to information resources, and digital literacy, is in its infancy, and few studies have focused on the practices of rural public cultural institutions.…”

Cyberspace at the Grassroots: E-Governance and Citizen/Stakeholder Perceptions at the Local Level in Bangladesh

“…While at the union-level telecentres, private entrepreneurs are fairly active in meeting the needs of service recipients, the upazila cyber kiosks are yet to engage them fully. The upazila centres operate on no known concrete business models; rather, their operational framework is governed by overarching guidelines provided by the government under the aegis of the so-called ‘Digital Bangladesh’ initiative (Siddiquee, 2016; Siddiquee & Faroqi, 2021).…”

“…The union digital centres (UDC) have been widely studied, and their merits and drawbacks analysed (Faroqi & Collings, 2019; Faroqi et al, 2018; Islam & Hasan, 2009; Rahman & Bhuiyan, 2014; Siddiquee & Faroqi, 2021; Ullah, 2017). The sub-district experiment, on the other hand, has found scant attention from scholars.…”