Training Rural SMEs on Using eGovernment Services

Regional as well as centralized authorities around Europe develop and offer an increased variety of online public services, which may be particularly useful for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in rural areas. Nevertheless, a major barrier towards their adoption has been identified to be the low degree of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) penetration that is usually recorded in these areas. Experience from initiatives that aim to address such barriers has led to the conclusion that ICT training activities for rural areas should be based on elements such as: specially designed training curricula that can convince SMEs about the benefits they will reap from introducing ICT in their business; innovative training models that can combine traditional forms of learning with e-learning forms; and online points of reference that SMEs may access to find relevant information and educational resources. To this direction, the ‘Rural-eGov’ project has been recently deployed to address such issues for SMEs in five European regions (namely Wales in UK, Brandenburg in Germany, Aegean islands in Greece, Koscierzyna community in Poland, and Moravske Toplice in Slovenia). In this paper, we present how Rural-eGov aims to support training of rural SMEs on the use of electronic government (e-government) services.