1 RESEARCH FOR TELECENTER DEVELOPMENT: OBSTACLES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Conducting field research in the developing world is, under any circumstances, a complex affair, and the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in this context adds yet another series of special challenges. Nevertheless, telecenter research offers tremendous opportunity to understand the role of communication and information in development. More im-portantly, a participatory research approach provides the tools to meet community needs, foster participation, and monitor the financial viability of the telecenter. The special challenges of ICT research must, therefore, be met and openly discussed. Accordingly, this is a paper about the particular challenges of research in telecenter development, and what is hopefully the beginning of a practical literature on responses to these issues. The obstacles and opportunities that inspired this paper were encountered during several months of fieldwork by two separate researchers on two different telecenter projects in rural In-dia. Consequently, we begin with a brief description of the two ICT initiatives, and our respective research agendas. This is Section 1. Section 2, generalizing somewhat from our specific field experiences, describes a set of challenges for research fieldwork in the area of ICT for deve l-opment. In it, we describe methodological concerns such as measurement issues and inevita