Gemidiriya IT Centres turning popular

By Gamini Warushamana

The Rural Community Information Centres initiated by the Gemidiriya Rural Development and Livelihood Improvement Project have been highly successful and are becoming popular among rural communities.

Gemidiriya has already initiated 160 information centres and three new centres were declared open in Idalgashinna, Balagolla and the Park village in Passara in the Badulla district recently.

Though the mobile telephony penetration in Sri Lanka is 38% or every two in five persons have a mobile telephone, still there are segments of people that do not have access to basic communication facilities.

Those pockets are rural villages and hamlets in the estate sector where even the basic infrastructure facilities are poor. However, the wireless mobile communication and CDMA technology covers these villages. But the communities cannot personally afford them.

The Project Officer, Samanmali Swarnalatha said that the objective of establishing these community information centres is to provide information to the rural communities in Gemidiriya villages. In the Community Driven Development Model (CDD) of Gemidiriya the decision making in the village development is done by the communities themselves. Therefore they need information and these were started to facilitate them, she said.

In this process, Gemidiriya has collaborated with several agencies and programs to obtain resources. At the beginning the World Computer Exchange helped Gemidiriya. Under the program they provided used computers to Gemidiriya People’s Companies to initiate computer units, basically used to computerise office functions and train the staff.Then the Gemidiriya Capacity Building Fund was used to purchase photo copy machines, fax machines and computers. With these equipment the computer units were transformed to Communication Centres catering to the basic communication needs of the villages.

The youth who followed computer courses using Gemidiriya skills development fund joined the communication centres and they started IT training in the communication centres.

With the collaboration of Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) Gemidiriya initiated Nenasala rural IT centres in Gemidiriya villages. Under the Post Conflict Fund Gemidiriya has initiated community information centres in the border villages.

The recently opened rural community information centre in the Diabara South in Idalgashinna caters to the Tamil communities in the Diabara Estate. It was started with one computer and other communication facilities.

The village is isolated due to poor transport facilities and people have to travel a long way to Welimada town to get a photocopy or telephone call.

Dilhani Anuruddika is a Gemidiriya community professional specialised in communication and is the head of the information centre in Balagolla Gemidiriya village. The start of the information centre is very humble and we commenced with one computer.

However, today we have a fully-fledged community information centre with eight computers and all communication facilities. The secret of the rapid growth is the high demand for the services and we cater to all the communication needs of the villagers. We provide agricultural information produced by the Department of Agriculture in video presentations for the farmers and farmer organisation in the village is closely linked with the information centre.

Schoolchildren come here regularly and today almost all the children in the village know how to operate a computer.

They know at least to play a computer game. We provide computer training in Windows Office and a graphic designing course will be started with collaboration of Youth Service Council, she said.