COW impact has to be measured from two angles; from the angle of skill development and capacity building of information providers and from the angle of gains made by the community they serve.

• In the case of COW information Providers, very significant gains in capacities were demonstrated. They were very simple village boys and girls with minimum levels of education, before becoming COW information providers and after sufficient training and orientation have been able to independently network with officials, people’s organisation and technology providers very much by themselves and have been able to access knowledge through them all by themselves, proving their own intuitive abilities. Such abilities by youth can accelerate pace of development in any region. Controllability of project orientation and managment moved into their hands for provision of the service due to significant increase in their capacities. Their uptake of technical skills were demonstrated by managing and troubleshooting solar solution requirements as well as software and hardware requirements. They have demonstrated strong capacities in handling early on rudimentary free software design platforms challenge in MYSQL databases with APACHE server. Without external help they had been able to handle audio, video presentations for people who seek services, officials and departments who support service provision and also in other forums like conferences and press meets.

• It was felt by COW team that FGD’s are the best way to capture qualitative information from the service seekers as well as providers, since COW emphasis was more on overall socio, economical gains than mere quantitative gains in numbers, especially as the region is backward with very low GDP. Most of the feedback on impact comes back through COW information providers and gets validated through FGD’s subsequently. Knowledge gained this way is used to fill in the gaps in service provision and match the expectations of the service seekers without losing integrity and validity of the information. This process involves culturally sensitive information design in partnership with the information providers. For example when COW was rendering remote health service it was found that the terminology used to ascertain information for diagnosis by the local registered and unregistered medical practitioners was different from that of a general medical practitioner outside the region. COW had to go several rounds of validation on the terms used and their meaning before matching it with the standard medical terms. This process helps the information provider to get the most appropriate information confidently on medical history supported by prompt generating software solution developed subsequently that can be understood by any medical fractioned irrespective of the region.

• On the service side COW project has gained good will. However, there are occassional disappointments expressed by people whenever there is a mismatch in what is expected and what is provided, like the number of trips a IP might have made to meet the people in the villages, or exactness of information he provides. COW impact is tested in education, health including HIV AIDS related information provision, agriculture, youth livelihood and governance. Demand for COW services increased in health, governance, education and entertainment services over the past few years. In village schools visible knowledge gain in students after the project intervention is recorded in the regional school meeting especially on difficult concepts like eclipse. Livestock farmers have acknowledged gains by saving their livestock from communicable diseases in several villages. People reported to have been cured by remote health support in general. There are specific instances of measurable gains in money, travel time for individuals who used COW services. Pest infestation was arrested by acting quickly after the needed advice was given through COW provider in few villages. Cropping information generated by COW is found useful by government administration and service is contracted by District Collectors Office, Civilian Photographs were ordered by Regional Administrative office for making Civilian Identity Cards recurrently, Village girls formed into a group to create a data base of their embroidery designs after using Scalable Vector Graphics software for accessing urban clients. Currently COW Information Provider is working with this group for enhancing their computer abilities to use the software for creating new designs.