Rural Internet Information Centres - China

Local government officials at every level of the project are actively involved in its implementation. At the county level, local leaders provide guidance and mobilise experts from different sectoral departments for regular advisory meetings on, for example, Internet-based information needed by the county. At the village and town levels, governments provide staff to work at the centres. In some counties, the government departments themselves are among the heaviest users of the services. The project centres are located in government-provided facilities; a few centres are in village school buildings.

The project has a pyramid-shaped support structure. At the core is the MOST office in Beijing, with several technical staff who make frequent visits to the project sites in each province. Field staff, down to the village level, have traveled to Beijing to receive training; some county-level managers and government officials have undertaken annual overseas training tours. The Beijing office has a central website (in Chinese language only), linked to those of each county centre. Each county has an Internet centre with high-speed access to the Internet and about ten computer terminals for providing training to village and town project staff. Reporting to each county are two township Internet centres, providing training and services to local townspeople and surrounding villages. Every project town has two village centres that provide training and services to local villagers. Each centre has a staff of between two and five people, one of which manages the operation while the others provide training and solicit suggestions from local users.

All centres use computers made by a local Chinese company. Each village centre has a dial-up line for accessing the Internet from one or two PCs. Visitors may use non-wired PCs for learning or practicing typing skills or to watch and listen to video CDs (VCDs). Every centre has a phone and fax machine for sending periodic reports to its respective county centre. Village and town centres also have a separate room for viewing videos or VCDs providing information related to community-specific needs, like new agricultural technologies.

The village and town centres provide users with basic training in typing, computer operations, and searching for information online. Information staff at the centres search for information online based on user requests. In descending order of frequency, sought-after information includes market prices, new agricultural technologies, health information, educational data to help with schoolwork or applications, and job searches. Most of the centres have an external bulletin board for regular posting of useful information retrieved from the Internet. The centres act largely acting as information sources - a kind of online library - rather than as vehicles for communication. Few users or staff have their own e-mail accounts. Instead, each centre has a central e-mail address on behalf of those few users who need to have information sent to or from another web address.

To cite a few specific programme details, Tongnan's centre produced a 50-page manual developed especially for training village and town staff; a website offering free email accounts and agricultural technology video clips for those with high-speed access; a practice of paying staff according to results based on monthly in-person reviews; an advertising campaign including weekly 3-5 minute TV spots, wall posters, sign boards, and bus banners describing the project; and a training programme that includes final exams to assess whether staff have properly absorbed the lessons. In Shangcheng, ten "model households" have been designated in each village. These households have benefited from the information centre and in return share their experiences with neighbours and visitors. Training sessions are held for villagers. An active outreach programme involves assigning particular staff the task of going to households to ask what information is needed.

Technology, Agriculture, Economic Development.

This is largely a home-grown effort: although the UNDP provides about one quarter of the funding, principally for training and consultancies, one third comes from the central government's Ministry of Science and Technology, with the rest - approximately 40% of the total - coming directly from the benefiting counties themselves. Within each county, funds come not only from the county-level government but from participating towns and villages.

A few of the information centres are located in nationally designated poor counties, where average incomes fall below the government's poverty line. The poorest villages are not necessarily being served in each county, and it is unclear whether the very poorest in each village are using the information services. The very poorest in China are concentrated in mountainous regions that are impenetrable to much of the technology involved.

Click here to access a summary of the evaluation of this programme.