Abstract:
As the world moves towards information society, countries started to extend access to
information and communication technologies to their populations. Telecenters have been
seen as an important means of bridging the digital divide; providing access to appropriate
information required for social and economic development. Hence development of rural
information kiosks has become increasingly popular development initiative, increasing in
number worldwide. In Sri Lanka, e-Sri Lanka strategy, acknowledged affordable access to
ICTs will ensure more effective, citizen centered and business friendly government,
empowerment of the rural poor, women and youth. It envisioned a ‗community-based open
access workstations‘ program called Nenasala, to ensure availability of affordable basic
communication services, access to social services, e-commerce and mobilization of local
knowledge. Evaluation work in the development sector has evolved through a revolutionary
path, as a practice as well as profession. The taxonomy of evaluation is multipronged, can be
seen categorized based on different perspectives, criterions, inputs used, and perhaps the
phase of intervention being evaluated. But there is as yet no widely accepted systematic
evaluation procedure for telecenter programs. No shortage of evaluative frameworks for ICT
for Development, but, none is completely satisfactory for measuring access to ICTs.
Therefore alternative evaluative frameworks are increasingly required or existing evaluative
criterions should be redefined to cater to the specific requirements of telecenter initiatives, for
instance to measure the extent to which beneficiary groups are effectively and meaningfully
engaged with ICTs. This paper gives a brief overview on evaluation of development aid, and
then moves on to discuss what is missing in evaluating ‗ICTs for Development‘ initiatives.
While introducing the ‗Nenasala‘ telecenter initiative in Sri Lanka, it reviews the magnitude
of reflection of access in three consecutive evaluations commissioned to study the telecenter
program.
