Today, in the knowledge age, the importance of
information and communication as key enablers of economic and social
prosperity has been widely recognized. A number of efforts to harness the
power of ICTs for the benefit of resource hungry poor communities have been
made by governments, NGOs and many international development agencies.
Many projects have been
undertaken by various national and international agencies and NGOs to
address the needs of the underprivileged through the use of ICTs especially
the use of Internet and web site development, in such community centres.
Some of the limitations of these experiments are, lack of awareness
and knowledge, literacy and lack of access of ICT in local languages.
Solutions are often projects with setting of connectivity to Internet and
setting of local language web sites. These often are time consuming and
demands special skills, thus impacting sustainability of such projects. Such
web sites are often managed by a single person, rather than with community
participation.
Effective communication
within and among community is a necessary ingredient for empowering the
communities. However, these web sites invariably focus more on information
retrieval and less on providing facilities for community communication and
participation. Searching for relevant information on the Internet is time
consuming, costly, requires knowledge of English language and also requires
special skill set. Even when information has been gathered, its relevancy
and authenticity cannot be judged immediately. This problem is further
compounded by the low standard of living and low literacy of the
underprivileged section of the society.
Last but not the least,
research data on access habits of community members is severely lacking.
Such data, if made available, can greatly enhance the effectiveness of ICTs
in improving the lot of the underprivileged.
eNRICH was developed by NIC
in response to the need expressed by UNESCO to address the above challenges
in its cross-cutting theme project ictPR (ICT for Poverty Reduction).
eNRICH is a generic and yet
easily customizable web based software solution that acts as a gateway to a
community’s own world of knowledge, communication and empowerment. It
enables communities to quickly and efficiently build their own gateway
website, enriched with their own local content and connected to knowledge
sources and services that are tailored according to their own information
and communication needs.
Features
