For further information contact: Nathan Russell

Communications for Community Development

Rural families throughout the tropics are eager to build sustainable rural livelihoods, and CIAT, together with its national partners, must find better ways of helping them succeed. One crucial step is to develop means by which rural communities can more readily acquire and manage information and knowledge, so they can make sound decisions about a wide range of complex tasks, such as agroenterprise development, integrated pest and soil nutrient management, as well as land use planning.

Linking Research with Development

Revolutionary information and communications technologies (ICTs) are now available—particularly the Internet and powerful information management tools—that could facilitate these tasks. But such technologies have not yet been made widely available or relevant to the rural poor in marginal environments.

Over the next few years, large-scale public and private sector schemes will likely broaden access to ICTs in tropical countries at a surprisingly rapid rate. Nonetheless, as the Internet and other tools become more widely available in rural areas, there is a real danger that their potential for helping create sustainable livelihoods will remain largely unexploited.

CIAT and its partners thus have the opportunity and the obligation to demonstrate convincingly how ICTs can be used to create vital links between research and development along the whole information- and knowledge-sharing continuum, from international and national research institutions to local organizations and communities. The Center must also conduct research aimed at better understanding the role and impact of ICTs in rural communities, it must and then widely diffuse the lessons from research and its experience.

Community Telecenters

As a first step in this direction, CIAT embarked on a community telecenter project—called InforCauca—during January 2000 in southwestern Colombia. The work is supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada. Community telecenters are public facilities that provide access to, and usually training in the use of, various information and communication technologies (ICTs), including the Internet.

The project's central aim is to develop appropriate telecenter models for building the capacity of individuals and organizations in marginalized regions to benefit from information related to social and economic development as well as natural resource management. InforCauca is being implemented by CIAT and the Corporación Universitaria Autónoma de Occidente (CUAO) in partnership with nine community organizations, which are responsible for managing the community telecenters.

The project is establishing and supporting three telecenters in diverse circumstances. One is being managed by a local NGO (Fundación Carvajal, which is well known for its innovative development programs) in a poor urban neighborhood of Cali; another by the Asociación de Cabildos Indigenas del Norte de Cauca (ACIN), a rural-based association of 14 indigenous governing councils; and the third by a consortium that includes a local cultural center, an NGO, a local agricultural training institute, the local municipal government, and two community R&D organizations.

The project receives complementary financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Its funds are being used to evaluate the impacts of ICTs in local organizations and communities and to support the development of Web-based information systems (linked to conventional communications media) that might enhance those impacts. One product now under development is a local system for managing and disseminating information that can facilitate the development of rural agroenterprises.

Particularly in recent months, the telecenters have demonstrated a strong capacity to incorporate ICTs into the work of local organizations on high-priority issues. ACIN, for example, has found innovative ways of using the Internet to defend indigenous people against human rights abuses committed by the various armed groups engaged in an intense guerilla war in the region.