We always think of beautiful sceneries, mysterious culture and honest villagers while mentioning ethnic villages. However, the impoverishment, sparseness and desolation behind them cannot be ignored.

Given the typical characteristics of rural areas, such as sparseness of population, lack of trained personnel, low initial demand and high costs of installing individual services, it was suggested that the introduction of enhanced information exchange in rural areas of Africa should be achieved through the establishment of telecentres where services would be pooled to serve the entire community.