The project’s most directly beneficiaries are the farmers using a telecentre or not currently - It will increase access to input and farm product markets for the targeted 270000 farmers coming from 9 participating districts that have been strategically selected in order to increase telecentre impact in livelihood improvement.
The intermediate beneficiaries will be the 9 telecentres (one per district), around which project activities are organized in order to increase their sustainability. The key pivot of activities will be organized around a human hub that will be called a MoMEALS Market Centre established based on the lessons learnt from the African-Indian study tour organized by CTA at the end of 2009. MoMEALS Market Centres will then connect into telecentres before connecting into the Network.
Where Telecentres don’t exist, MoMEALS Market Centres will connect directly into the national network system or a partnership with a cybercafé that is interested in growing a social support component will be nurtured. The project will also increase the economic activities in participating telecentres. Telecentres or otherwise hubs, will be responsible for collecting farmer phone numbers, mobilizing farmers to participate in the project benefiting, soliciting for local partnerships and for organizing the necessary factors of marketing e.g. transport, storage, packing, community training, financing assess, means of payment (mobile money registration), etc.
Telecentres may emerge as sub-cooperatives of some kind. In return the program will increase telecentre economic activities and the benefits of receiving returns on each of the individual user of the MoMEALS platform as a financial contribution to telecentre sustainability – once the system has stabilities into a program. This would increase the available disposable money that will be helpful in sustaining the telecentre. It also will give an opportunity to present telecentre non users to start using the telecentre.
The sharing of the experience will enable the other 212 telecentres to connect into the service to amplify wider telecentre impact within Uganda and spreading of the cases for scale up within other telecentre networks in African.
The project experience sharing notch will be helpful in introducing a new value added for telecentre networks in Africa, which equally has potential to contribute to the networks financial and program sustainability. The service to be developed can sustain both telecentres and the networks they belong too once lessons are strategically up-scaled.
