Wondering About Telecentres: can they contribute to sustainable development in Latin America?

Telecentres are now the focus of much attention in international development discourse. Hailed as the solution to development problems by providing desperately needed access to information and communication technologies (ICTs), telecentres are springing up in Africa, Latin America and Asia. This paper examines the notion of telecentres under a critical light, suggests a typology to describe the diversity of experiences emerging, calls attention to the need for assessment of their impact on communities, and describes preliminary telecentre efforts in Latin America. Why believe in ICTs for sustainable development? The effect of the application of information and communication technologies on sustainable development efforts is far from clear, according to the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD) which recently spent three years investigating the benefits and risks of ICTs. The Commission found that " there are many instances where the use of ICTs is bringing widespread social and economic benefits. However, there are as many instances where ICTs are making no difference to the lives of people in developing countries or are even having harmful effects " (Mansell and Wehn, 1998). Furthermore, emerging studies show that many of the claims being made about the potential of ICTs for development are not supported, and point to possible counter-productive effect