In an initial trial phase the village scribe may be able to purchase a licence to use the school lab. The school may pay eventual repairs or new equipment with the licence fees. The village scribe will in turn ask for a service fee from the community members who use the service that the village scribe provides. This may be a great advantage especially to illiterate people who cannot read emails or find out information. These fees would make up the income of the village scribe. Attaching monetary value and costs to all the proceedings are important to motivate the village scribes to think in an entrepreneurial manner and to make use of opportunities.

The village scribe will have to meet several conditions. He or she must have the necessary skills to handle computer hard- and software and to repair simple failures or malfunctions. He or she has to be approved by an authority in the community and has to be educated appropriately to help other computer users or even illiterate persons in accessing facilities and the Internet. Further, he or she has to be able to decide who can use the computers autonomously and who is only accredited for usage under supervision. Finally, the village scribe needs to have some simple management skills for bookkeeping and the running of the business. We believe that a sign of the sustainability of our project will be that students of our learning programme will graduate and go on to become village scribes who are committed to staying in their home communities and improving them.

The concept of the Village Scribe Project

Computing facilities and the Internet open a whole number of new avenues for literate community members to improve their economic situation by reaching out and interacting with the South African and global Internet communities. Additionally, these resources present an important way for the government to interact with rural communities, which have currently been disenfranchised by distance. These two activities, namely eCommerce and eGovernment, bring the most immediate and tangible benefits to the community. The problem lies in unlocking their potential for the community. As it stands, the community cannot make use of the opportunities being offered on the Internet because they lack sufficient awareness and understanding of the multiplicity of concepts required to master the tool. Only a person who is part of the community but also understands the Internet is able to make the resource available to everyone. It is this concept that gives our Association its name: the village scribe is someone who brings digital services to the community to improve their lives. Such a concept is comparable to the situation in many parts of Europe in the 19th century and earlier, when the village scribe established the connection to the world for the people in the village who were not able to read and write.

Methods, Requirements and Partners

The ideal situation for sharing resources and using the lab to its full capacity would be that the school computer lab will be used by the village scribe after school classes are finished. And this will initially be the case. Unfortunately, for several reasons it is difficult to place the village scribe at a school for longer than a trial phase of a few months. In the longer term, the village scribe must buy his/her own computer equipment and get access to the Internet, and perhaps also power services from the school or elsewhere. The reason for this is that the school and its property belongs to the Department of Education (DoE) and cannot be used for commercial gain by a proprietor of a business – in this case the village scribe – on a permanent basis (although such arrangements may be negotiated under some circumstances).

Fortunately South Africa runs several programmes that are meant to empower the people and to improve access. The most obvious is the Universal Service Access Agency of SA (USAASA) . They are an obvious partner of choice for this extension to the project and we are already in discussion with them about possibilities for projects that afford access to services in a sustainable manner. USAASA, or other such bodies, could help the village scribe to get started providing cheap loans with low or no interest for the startup requirements of computing facilities and support with running costs. The small expenses of the village scribe would only require equally small subsidies, so that many village scribes could be supported.

Project Description    eGovernment    eCommerce    Our Assignment  

A satellite picture of all Village Scribe Project locations in South Africa so far.

Our village scribe in Rhini, Grahamstown, Mr Njegu