Village knowledge centre toolkit

About the project:

M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) have over the last ten years developed and supported an increasing number of Village Knowledge Centres (VKC) in Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu in India. These are ICT enabled and networked centres in poor rural villages which aim to help in poverty alleviation by the empowerment of villagers through the access to and sharing of knowledge. MSSRF have developed over 40 VKCs to date (2006) and they have codified their experience of developing these centres through publication of a 10 step "Toolkit" for the creation of of a VKC. This toolkit forms the basis of this web presentation. Further background on this project, which is now a founding component of the developing Jamsetji Tata National Virtual Academy for Rural Prosperity, can be found under the references and on the MSSRF web site

About this web site:

Julian Swindell (the author of this site) spent 10 weeks with MSSRF in early 2006 as a visiting scientist, studying the ways in which the VKCs have been established and function. Initial findings will be published later this year in a chapter in a new text book "Innovation, Education and Communication for Sustainable Development". This chapter looks at this toolkit, and the main content of this web site is copied from there. All visitors to this site are invited and encouraged to participate in discussion of this toolkit through the linked forum.

Please note that this site should work with any browser, but it is most reliable with Internet Explorer 6.

© MSSRF 2006
Image © MSSRF 2006 Image © Julian Swindell 2006