Opportunity

Dikhatole, South Africa, is not a place where you would expect to cruise the information highway. For one thing, it doesn't even have paved roads. And the families living there are on the frontline of society’s worst problems — unemployment, crime and inadequate schools.

But it does have an HP Digital Community Centre.

The Centre is providing members of the poverty-stricken community -- teachers, students, childcare workers and unemployed -- with basic computer, Internet and business skills. In its four-year existence, the Centre has trained 1,500 young people in various employment skills resulting in approximetaly 70% finding work or an apprenticeship.

HP sees long-term market opportunity in developed and underdeveloped regions currently unaddressed by technology. Moving beyond traditional philanthropy, HP is strengthening the link between philanthropic investments and long-term business objectives.

HP began launching DCCs in Africa, the Middle East and Europe (EMEA) in 2001. There are now eleven: in France, Ghana, Hungary, Ireland, Jordan, Northern Ireland, Russia, Ukraine, Scotland, Senegal and South Africa. Later this year, in Portugal, another Digital Community Centre will be launched. 

Which community will benefit most from the project? Which of the experiments will prove most successful and serve as a future model? In order to find out, all the projects are being reviewed regularly.

Each Centre is set up in collaboration with a network of partners including schools, universities, local government, community services and non-profit organisations.

The approach is to engage closely with the community, just as we engage with our customers, to understand the specific needs and issues they would like technology to help solve.

The Digital Community Centre usually involves a range of partnerships, an 'eco-system' with many organisations (business, government, NGO) bringing different things to the project.  In South Africa, Russia and the Ukraine, for example, one of HP’s partners is ORT – one of the largest non-profit organisations in the vocational and technology training field.

The Digital Community Centre in Dublin, initiated by the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) three years ago, is helping the inner-city communities fulfill their aspirations for participation in the digital age.

Last year over 1,200 participants, young and old, took part in the 120 different programmes offered by the Centre – ranging from how to send email, to basic IT skills and digital videography. The project has been viewed as so successful that in 2003, Ireland’s Information Society Commission suggested that the Digital Community Centre serve as a model for addressing, to a large extent, the country’s digital divide. “The Digital Community Project will influence greatly the way residents of these communities live, learn and earn,” says Dr Thomas Cooke, head of Dublin Institute of Technology’s Community Links Programme.

The Hungarian Digital Community Centre, established in Miskolc in December 2002, has become a national centre of excellence for environmental education.  The DCC created a multimedia centre at the country’s Petroleum and Gas Institute to train teachers and their students on the usage of an online training platform in the environmental field. In March 2005, the Miskolc DCC launched the ‘Envirotrainer’ programme, a distance learning course that prepares secondary school teachers for transferring state-of-the-art environmental knowledge to their students.

The unrest that swept across France in autumn 2005 took place in deprived suburbs like the ones just north of the French capital. Some 85 nationalities and ethnic groups live in these districts side by side. Unemployment among the young residents is between 30 and 40 %. Lacking hope of a job, many turn to drugs, crime and the black market.

It is here, in the Seine-Saint-Denis area, that HP has created a Digital Community Centre in partnership with local communities in four cities (Villetaneuse, Bobigny, Blanc-Mesnil and Epinay) and two organisations that specialise in vocational training. Villetaneuse and Bobigny Technology Universities are leading the project. The centres offer technology training and award official diplomas – necessary for job applications in France. The main objective is to save young people from delinquency. More that 3,000 people have been trained since it began in 2002 and many of them have found jobs at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle International airport in nearby Roissy.

What began as a broad effort by HP to apply technology to closing the digital divide is now focused largely on using ICT to accelerate enterprise and entrepreneurship, and thereby stimulate economic growth. HP will support the Digital Community Centre for three years to ensure that is has a longer-term, sustainable impact.

From day one, the goal of each Digital Community Centre is to reach longer-term sustainability with on-going funding from local government or other agencies. HP and its partners have worked closely with local government and businesses, and members of the community, so that the impact of a Digital Community Centre will be sustainable after three years of HP´s initial engagement.