The Story

Background and context: Rural Uganda is a difficult place for women. Many women are the primary providers for households, either responsible for doing much of the agriculture work, or running a small business. Despite this role as providers, men, not women, usually have access to credit and local business exchanges.

The Uganda chapter of the Council for the Economic Empowerment for Women of Africa (CEEWA) tries to rectify this problem and help women find the financial resources t more...

Abstract: 'The debate about the value of modern ICTs to developing regions, some of which lack basic infrastructure for water and sanitation, continues in the halls of development agencies and national governments. Are ICTs a springboard for leapfrog development? Are they able to deliver improvements in the lives of the poor in the short term? Are community telecentres a forerunner of what might be a 'connected' future for hitherto isolated rural communities? If future investment in connectivity more...

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has telecentre evaluation initiatives in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Each of these is in the process of establishing evaluation frameworks and each is adopting very different approaches. The current paper seeks to build on the outputs of IDRC’s Far Hills Workshop on Telecentre Evaluation (September 1999) to explore the experiences in the two regions. These explorations will in turn contribute to IDRC’s current initiative to develop a f more...