Maximizing the Impact of Community Information Centres on Education, Health and Development in the Age of Computers and Mobile Technologies
Community information service (CIS)-related publications agree that people in communities, especially rural, need information and should be helped to have it for solving daily life’s problems and developing themselves and community. From the publications, it is evident that advent of computers and mobile technologies or information and communication technologies (ICTs) had caused an uncleared confusion in naming and operating a CIS. Aimed at highlighting this problem and giving a recipe for a CIS to impact maximally on education, health and overall development, this work is a critical analysis of the literature. It found most CISs reported on inadequate and ineffective. While a majority of sponsors believe that CIS is solely about ICTs, a few think it is about either a library or a combination of a library and ICTs. Ten names were found for a CIS, including community information centre (CIC), telecentre, community information and communication technology centre, community library, community multimedia centre, cybercafé and information kiosk. Stock and services provided depended on the name. One thing common is the expectation that people should go for information when they need it. There is little thought about the reality that many people may not know they need information and about how to serve people who are incapacitated in other ways to go or ask for information. Thinking critically about all these alongside the goal of CIS achievable only with ICT and non-ICT resources and strategies that match every community member’s differences, preferences, deficiencies and constraints, the researcher concludes that any other name than CIC is needless. This understanding brings about maximum impact, which can be supported with data from further researches.