Running a Telecentre in South Africa That Pays Its Way

Half past eight on a Monday, and nine people are waiting outside a telecentre that has twelve computers. Two are there to sort out UIF. One needs a CV printed before an interview at eleven. A matriculant wants to upload documents for a bursary application, and the woman at the front of the queue has a SASSA problem she has been carrying around for three weeks.

Inside, one volunteer is switching the machines on and writing names and start times into an exercise book. The quarterly report to the funder is due on Friday.

That centre is doing exactly the job it was set up to do. Whether it is still open in two years has almost nothing to do with demand. It comes down to what it charges, how it counts what it does, and how much of the day one person spends walking between twelve machines. (The spelling telecenter turns up in American writing, but South African policy documents and research have always used telecentre, so that is what this uses.)

What people still need a telecentre for

Connectivity is not the shortage it was five years ago. Phase two of SA Connect wrapped up in the 2026 budget having built 32,055 community Wi-Fi hotspots, with coverage claimed for around 5.6 million households, and prepaid data has come down from about R100 a gigabyte in 2020 to roughly R79 in 2025.

Almost everyone in that Monday queue has a phone. They are queuing anyway.

What they need is a keyboard, a printer and somebody who has filled in the form before. A UIF claim needs documents scanned and uploaded. SARS eFiling on a phone browser is a bad afternoon. Bursary and learnership applications want certified copies as PDFs, job portals want a CV that is not a photograph of a CV, and a matric certificate has to be printed for the person at the counter to accept it. Municipalities have noticed which way this went: the community library that opened in Akasia in 2025 put 30 public computers and free Wi-Fi into its ICT section, in a building most people walk to.

So the work in a telecentre has shifted. Less browsing, more paperwork, and far more of the hand-holding that phones cannot do.

Watch who actually comes through the door over a week and the mix is wider than most funding proposals assume. School learners printing projects. Job seekers, obviously. People who have just registered a small business and need to load documents onto the government supplier database, pensioners who want a bank statement printed, a church group booking a hall, somebody's aunt who needs a photograph of an ID turned into a proper scan. In practice a telecentre ends up being the place where the neighbourhood deals with anything that requires a computer and a deadline.

Row of public computers in a small South African telecentre on a weekday morning

Where a telecentre's money actually comes from

Government-funded telecentres were designed to run on cost recovery, which means the centre is expected to cover its own running costs out of what it charges. That works when the price list has more on it than time.

Looking at what community centres and township internet cafés charge around the country, the picture is fairly consistent:

The share each of those contributes is the part worth memorising. In a working telecentre, computer time is usually 30 to 40 percent of income. Printing and copying bring in another 25 to 35 percent, assisted services somewhere between 15 and 25 percent, and airtime and small retail make up the rest.

Read that again and the strategy is plain. Time through the door is what brings people in. Printing and assisted applications are what pay the rent. A telecentre that charges only for hours is leaving most of its income on the table, and it will be the first one to go quiet when the grant that bought its computers runs out.

There is a cost hiding inside that printing income, and it catches out nearly every new telecentre: paper and toner. Both get bought in a hurry at retail prices when they run out mid-morning, which is the most expensive way to buy either of them. Count pages printed against paper bought once a month. If those two numbers drift apart, somebody is printing for free, and it is usually a very polite regular that the volunteer does not want to argue with.

Pricing time so nobody gets turned away

The unit that actually sells in this market is 15 minutes. One centre in Polokwane prices its internet at R5 for 15 minutes, R10 for 30, R15 for 45 and R20 for the hour, and sells the time as a ticket that stays valid for a month.

That last part is the clever bit, and it is worth copying properly rather than on paper. A paper ticket gets lost in a school bag. Put the same R5 onto a member account and the balance is still there next Tuesday, which matters enormously to someone who buys time in small amounts because that is what they have on them.

Accounts also solve the free-access question. Most telecentres have two kinds of users sitting side by side: people paying their own R20, and people whose time is covered by a programme, a bursary scheme or the municipality. If the sponsored hours live on member accounts too, topped up by whoever is funding them, the front desk treats everyone the same way and the two streams stay separate in the numbers. iCafeCloud handles this with member accounts with prepaid time, where you top up a balance, add a bonus if there is a promotion on, and leave a comment saying where the money came from.

iCafeCloud member list with the top-up window open, showing account balance, payment method and bonus fields

Two more price decisions are worth making deliberately rather than drifting into them. Decide early whether learners get a cheaper afternoon rate, and write it on the wall so the volunteer is not negotiating it twelve times a day. Then decide what a printing-only customer pays for the two minutes they spend at a machine to open the file: most centres that survive charge nothing for that and take the margin on the page, because the person collecting a printed CV is the same person who will pay for a full hour when the interview date comes through. A telecentre lives on those repeat visits far more than on any single transaction.

Regulars can be handled without anyone having to remember faces. Discounts trigger on their own once a member crosses a top-up amount or a number of hours used, and you decide where those thresholds sit. Set the first one close enough that a job seeker coming in twice a week reaches it inside a month.

How does one volunteer cover twelve computers?

By taking fewer steps. That is genuinely most of the answer, and it is the part that decides whether a telecentre survives being staffed by one person.

When a member logs in, the session starts and the time counts down on its own. The seat locks when the time is finished. From the counter you can end a session, restart a machine or cut a seat off without standing up, which sounds like a small thing until you picture the same person trying to help someone photograph a certificate while PC 7 has been sitting idle and paid-for since twenty past ten.

Two practical arrangements are worth setting up on day one.

Put two machines right at the counter and call them the assisted seats. Anyone who needs help with a UIF form or a bursary upload sits there, and the volunteer helps without leaving the desk. The other ten are self-service, and they can be priced slightly lower. The queue then stops being one line where a single complicated application holds up nine people.

The second one is a peak-hour rule. Two rushes dominate the week in most telecentres: after school, and the days around grant payments at the start of the month. Cap sessions at 30 minutes during those windows and let them run longer when the room is half empty. If you want to see how the session and seat controls behave before committing to anything, try the session controls in the live demo.

One more thing about the queue itself, because it costs nothing to fix. Put a bench inside and hand out numbers. A telecentre with people waiting on the pavement looks closed from across the street, and the person who gives up at 08:45 is the same person who tells three neighbours the place is always full. A bench and a number also stop the small arguments about who arrived first, which is what the volunteer was refereeing instead of helping with the bursary upload.

Public PCs that are clean every morning

Public computers get used by strangers with USB sticks. That is the whole job description.

Booting the machines diskless changes what the morning looks like. With CCBoot the client PCs load Windows from the server, the system is restored on every reboot, and viruses and trojans go with it. Yesterday's downloads, the browser session somebody forgot to close, the toolbar that appeared out of nowhere: gone at the next restart. The client machines do not need hard drives at all, which is a real saving when a centre is running refurbished desktops where the drives are the oldest part in the box, and an update installed once on the server reaches every seat after a reboot. It is the diskless setup schools use for their computer labs, and a telecentre is much the same problem with a different queue outside the door.

There is a privacy argument in here too, and it is worth making to your funder. People sign into email, bank profiles and government portals on these machines, often without understanding what stays behind on a shared computer. A telecentre where every machine goes back to a clean state overnight is one where yesterday's user cannot be found in today's browser.

The report your funder is really asking for

Funders and municipalities do not ask how many sessions you opened. They ask how many people you served.

Those are different numbers. The gap between them is large. One job seeker might come nine times in a month while preparing for interviews. Nine sessions, one person. If your report counts sessions, your telecentre looks nine times busier than it is with individuals, and a sharp programme officer will ask about it.

So build the monthly figure out of member accounts: unique members who used the centre that month, total hours, and paid time shown separately from sponsored time. The daily report in iCafeCloud gives you earnings, expenses and member activity for each day or shift, and those days add up into exactly the three numbers above without anyone reconstructing them from an exercise book on Thursday night.

Diagram of paid and sponsored sessions rolling up into a monthly usage report

Keep a fourth number next to them, even though nobody asked for it: what the most common assisted service was that month. When it is UIF claims for eight months running, that is the case for the next round of funding, written by your own customers.

Power, connectivity and the hours you open

The national picture has improved a lot. Eskom came through the 2026 winter with the grid intact and has gone more than 470 days without load shedding.

Load reduction is a separate thing, and it is still running in overloaded areas, typically from 05:00 to 09:00 and again from 17:00 to 22:00. Find out whether your feeder is on that schedule before you print opening hours on the door, because those two windows sit exactly where an early queue and an after-work queue would be. Put the server, the router and the printer on a UPS so a short outage does not cost you the session records and a half-finished print job. Fibre, where it is available, runs somewhere around R500 to R1,500 a month for a small telecentre, and government sites connected under SA Connect are provisioned at a minimum of 10 Mbps.

Opening hours follow from that, not from what the neighbouring shops do. If the morning window takes your power until nine, open at half past nine and stay open into the evening, and tell people plainly on the door and on WhatsApp. To be fair, most regulars work this out faster than the centre does (they have the same schedule at home), but the ones who lose a morning finding out are the ones who stop coming.

Start with ten computers

None of this needs a big-bang installation.

iCafeCloud has 3000+ clients in 90+ countries with 24/7 support, it is priced per PC per month with a discount for paying annually, and you can apply for a 15-day trial licence for ten or more machines, extendable to 30 days if you need more time. Ten machines and two weeks is enough to run a full month-end through it, grant days included.

Use the fortnight to answer four questions, and write the answers down. How many unique people came in? How many hours did they actually use, against how many they paid for? What did the assisted seats do that the self-service seats did not? And how much did the telecentre take on the busiest day compared to the quietest? Those four figures are the start of the conversation with a funder, a municipality or a bank, and they are much harder to argue with than an exercise book.

Come back to that Monday morning queue. The same nine people arrive, the volunteer opens up, and everyone signs in at the machine instead of at the counter. The R5 that the learner did not use on Thursday is still on her account. At the end of the month the funder gets a figure for people served that the telecentre can stand behind, and the exercise book goes back to being an exercise book.