New partners mean that RITS APC member in Rio de Janeiro is drawing up a blue-print for the set-up and operation of 1000 telecentres in municipalities situated in areas of extreme poverty throughout Brazil. This follows RITS’ experience working with the government in Brazil’s largest city to establish over a 100 free public internet access points in marginalised neighbourhoods.
RITS (Information Network for the Third Sector) is the São Paolo Prefecture’s partner in one of the country’s largest infoinclusion projects: the São Paolo Telecentre project, that is establishing over 100 free public internet access points serving more than 300,000 people per month in some of the city’s poorest communities, many of which are characterised by high levels of violence and social exclusion. RITS’s participation in this project is through the management of the human resources involved in this initiative, providing free software courses, and working towards the full appropriation of ICTs for furthering social development. To this effect, RITS is carrying out activities related to the production of local content, in addition to informing people about, and debating wide-ranging issues, such as gender, race and ethnicity, disabilities and other elements that can lead to social exclusion – with the broader objective of promoting equality in our telecentres, enhanced by the use of ICTs.
Through its consolidated experience in implementing and managing community telecentres, RITS, with new partners, has been able to broaden its scope of activity in the telecentre network – to the Jequitinhonha Valley; two pilot telecentres in Amazonia in partnership with the Saúde e Alegria (Health and Happiness) Project; municipalities covered by the Fome Zero (Zero Hunger) programme, and through participation in the project promoted by the Ministério Extraordinário de Segurança Alimentar (Extraordinary Ministry for Food Security – MESA). Through this initiative, 1,000 telecentres will be established in municipalities situated in areas of extreme poverty, covered by the Food Voucher programme, and by food security and local development partnerships, within the framework of the Fome Zero programme. It is up to RITS to develop a technical and methodological feasibility plan for the establishment of community telecentres, which contains a model, considered to be effective for this project, for the implementation and operation of telecentres.
