Impact Of Union Digital Center On Rural Development In Bangladesh

Union Digital Center(UDC),multipurpose telecenter established in the local area of all over the country.The main goal of UDC is to serve the rural people and engaging them with access to information facilities within short-time to achieve the quick-win.The UDC operated with the Public-Private-Peoples-Partnership(PPPP)model where government,local entrepreneur and peoples are considered as a stakeholder.Around 4554 UDC serving the rural people by the young entrepreneurs.The major intention of this study is examined the impact of UDC on fastening rural development.To the betterment of this study,the famous "Diffusion of innovation"theory has been adapted for the theoretical framework.From the three approaches,Pluralist research has been adopted with mix methods combination.Data collected from the 370 respondents,those are related to the UDC.The data analyzed with the Structure Equation Modeling with help of PLS-SEM version 3.2.3 and SPSS statistical software Version 21.With the mediating effects,three hypothesizes supported in this study.The impact of UDC is positively associated with rural development has been shown in the analysis.The impact of UDC is positively associated with rural development has been shown in the analysis.The finding also indicated that the digital divide is reducing day by day by the active role of UDC.The significant impacts of UDC on accelerating rural development through improving the rural people's livelihood.However,the study also pursues the Entrepreneurs role in UDC and which is found quite an unstable condition due to lack of income-security,proper patronization from concern authority.Besides the influence of UDC on the rural people is not bad but need to more effective for fasten the broader development in the rural.One of the major contributions of this study is placed the UDC as a new innovation where the attributes of innovation can support it for extensive diffusion.In light of this study strongly recommends that the effectiveness of UDC on rural development can be fastened by ensuring better support from the government as well as concern authority.