Informediary Lady - the central figure of Public Relations

Informediary lady plays the key role in information centred income generation model of Pallithtaya kendra (telecentre) (http://www.pallitathya.org), a unique telecentre model of D.Net (www.dnet-bangladesh.org) of Bangladesh. A lady who is good looking and demonstrating good public relation skills, plays the central role at the telecentre. She has two duties to perform, a). convince the incoming customer (mostly very poor villagers) to use the paid services, b). popularize the telecentre within local communities.


She has a routine work pattern. If somebody visits the telecentre, she welcomes her cordially and listen to them carefully in order to understand their problem / need. Then she is trained to assess whether telecentre has the capacity to provide a satisfactory service, if so, will describe the available information to villager, about help desk, information databases (which are made available as central services by D.Net). Finally, inform the price model and let the villagers to decide whether to use the services or not.

If villager agrees to pay - they will be offered a 'service card' which works as an invoice to the villager and also an entry into telecentre administration records.

The lady would further assist the villager by searching information databases, and finally would provide printed version of information.

If the required information were not available in the database systems, then the request would be made to the help desk at D.Net. which is resourced by subject experts.

On an average day, about 10 - 25 people visit the Kendra requesting services. Though at early stages of telecentre (in 2005) people were reluctant to pay for the services, by now they had recognized the value and pay without hesitation.

Following were some extracts from pervious day entries;

Visitor 1 - requested education information (Web addresses on universities, Visa application processes) aiming to search higher education prospects. (Available at data bases).

Visitor 2 - requested some help to resolve legal issues (and requested expert services from the help desk),

Visitor 3 - fisherman wanted to get some information about common fish farming problems which were available at database system.

Visitor 4 - another shrimp farmer wanted to find quick remedy for an emerging epidemic in his farm. He wanted a quick solution, a medicine to apply which was referred to the help desk. The medicine prescribed by the help desk was not available in the area. Thus informediary lady offered help to locate medicine from nearby area.

Pricing: content printout - 6taka /page, reading only - 2taka/ 10minutes, calling help desk - 2.5taka/ minute. (1US$ = 68Taka approx).

Legal help - first two minutes were free.