Adoption of Telecenters in South Wollo Zone of Amhara Regional State in Ethiopia: Special Emphasis on Internet Services

Information Communication Technology (ICT) has become driving force in today’s society strengthening national economies and supporting democratic processes worldwide. ICT has been a significant area of research, but its nature changed considerably with the emergence of the Internet. The Internet service is provided through different means including telecenters. New technologies should be adopted and accepted by the society to benefit from their potential advantage. Many researchers, in the field of ICT, have studied and proposed models of technology acceptance. One of those models is the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) which was proposed by Venkatesh et al (2003) and used in this research to find out direct determinant factors of telecenters for Internet services. In this research it is tried to find out the core constructs of telecenters’ Internet services intention to use and use behavior. Literature review has been done with respect to models of technology acceptance, ICT, telecenters and technology adoption. Self-administered questionnaire was used to collect primary data from 200 users of telecenters for Internet services. All the 200 questionnaires were usable; and demographic and descriptive statistics and Partial Least Square (PLS) regression were used to analyze the data. The study has found that performance expectancy and effort expectancy have positive influence in behavioral intention and behavioral intention has positive influence in use behavior of telecenters’ Internet services.