Bridging the Digital Divide
Subanu Perera
The British Council
Sri Lanka
Paper: 1/2 hour
Ethics, Economics & Exclusion
Project Bridging the Divide: Digital Divide
In 1999 the British Council hosted Towards a South Asia Knowledge Network in India to support the World Bank's initiative on Global Knowledge. It acted as a feeder event for the Global Knowledge II (GK-II ) conference by providing a forum within which the GK-II themes "access, empowerment and governance" could be discussed and priorities expressed.
Our Digital Divide (DD) project is also aimed at access, empowerment and governance and contributes to the Council's strategies objectives to strengthen links between the UK and Sri Lankan information professionals specially in the public library sector. It aims to create and develop an active information provision operation with IT component for the Sri Lankan rural public libraries which eventually should develop links with UK Peoples Network.
Access to vital information is the major priority for the whole of South Asia, which has the lowest Internet penetration in the world. There is an urgent need to find solutions that accelerate the flow of information to and from 'disadvantaged groups" especially in the rural areas. Our project has been set up to reach out to the rural public library users throughout the country (Ex. 8 provinces) and assist to harness vital and "workable" information utilisation Internet, etc. services.
The project was not only targeted at the public librarians but also the local officials to motivate them to provide access to these trained individuals to enhance their skills and to cascade training to rest of the colleagues/staff members.
Our target is to provide training to 160 rural public librarians (20 from each province) and thereby to establish a local network of trained information professionals and thereby to encourage them to network with the UK and the rest of the world. For each province librarians are selected to cover the entire provisional library network.
We have already completed 25% of the project target. Expected that we might reach our targets by the end of this year.
Overview of the presentation
- The beginning - Global Knowledge -2: conference
- Our project and the objectives of the British Council
- Project 'Bridging the Digital Divide' - introduction, concept and objectives
- Project 'Bridging the Digital Divide' - planning (ground work)
- Project 'Bridging the Digital Divide' - limitations, special concerns of long and short term and quality assurance
- Project 'Bridging the Digital Divide' - selecting of target group
- Project evaluations - feedback, user testing, etc.
- Where are we right now (our achievements and where we belong) & change management
- Project execution experiences and milestones (what we learned from the completed parts)
- The future
