Incorporating predictors of success for telecenter projects: A qualitative analysis of 17 developing countries

Abstract

Telecenters have become increasingly popular over the past decade as a development tool. Although there remains a large amount of literature describing telecenter projects and providing recommendations for how new projects should proceed, there remains a paucity of data discussing why some telecenters succeed and some fail. More specifically, researchers have not set out to analyze why certain telecenters do not exhibit success indicators recommended in the literature. This research uses grounded theory to analyze telecenters in 17 countries to better understand the conditions that may lead to telecenter success or failure. Using the current literature, the research provides a condensed list of possible key predictors of success for telecenter projects to effectively reach their target populations and uses this list as a structure to present findings from the qualitative analysis. Results indicate that although the analyses seem to generally support the proposed indicators of success, the lack of consistency in data across countries make understanding success in the countries difficult. This research leads to specific questions researchers should ask to better understand how success looks in different venues and why some countries exhibit possible indicators of success while others do not.