Scienceonline

Telecentre.org is a community of people and organizations committed to increase the social and economic impact of telecentres around the world. It now joins the Open Training Platform (OTP), a UNESCO-powered hub to free and open learning for development. Both Telecentre.org and OTP are the Flagship Partnership Initiatives of the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID).



At present, OTP regroups partners from all UN agencies (FAO, ILO/ITC, ITU, UNESCO, UNITAR, UNU, UNV, WHO and UNEP), worldwide development practitioners and agencies, as well as regional and local NGOs and CBOs. This 15-month old web portal keeps on growing: it has been visited 80 000 times since its creation, counts now over 2400 learning resources shared by 1700 members from 770 development stakeholders worldwide.

The evaluation of OTP conducted last May proved that the Platform is largely used, highly rated and adds additional value to the shared training material. The respondents showed most interest for “Computer Science and Information Management”, “Environment” and “Education” areas and recommended that OTP continues to expand in all development domains.

In addition to the “Training-on-demand” function already available, other new services will be developed shortly, such as the Francophone version, the customisation option for any interested communities or networks and enhanced search engine system. These concomitant efforts aim to even better serve the local people learning needs and to reinforce the active participation of development stakeholders.

Telecentre.org is a community of people and organizations that work together to create the resources telecentres need to succeed and to build the capacity of telecentre managers. The telecentre.org community includes grassroots activists, national telecentre networks, content and service providers, governments, and organizations that fund telecentre activities. Initial efforts to convene and resource this community were led by a consortium of Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Microsoft and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).