Distinguished Guests
Ladies and Gentlemen
I am very pleased to welcome our Japanese guests to South Africa.
Japan remains South Africa’s most important commercial partner in Asia. Relations between the two countries have been strengthened through a variety of educational, cultural and industrial exchange programmes.
For our part in the science and technology sector our aim in these exchanges has been to refocus investment in South African research and development away from the past and towards the future.
In the past the three main science and technology missions were self-sufficiency in defence, mining (and its related downstream industries), and agriculture.
Now our focus is on new industries and new technologies. We have chosen a number of priority areas for research and development – biotechnology, information technology, manufacturing technology, renewable energy, and space science and astronomy.
In deciding on these innovation areas we learned important lessons from Japan. Japan was once a late-comer country and spent many years playing catch-up with the US. And Japan was successful. It learned from the US about what made a national innovation system strong.
Japan learned that what made a national innovation system strong was attention to three important areas: a strong annual growth in funding basic research, a strong university-industry partnership, and a strong protection of intellectual property rights, especially in risky frontier fields.
We have followed suit.
South African funding of basic research has risen sharply over the past decade. Our universities are no longer ivory towers remote from industry and community. We have recently established an agency to protect and promote university intellectual property.
We have a lot to learn from Japan as far as university-industry collaboration is concerned. South African universities and government have been slow to promote spin-off companies, technology transfer contracts and patents. We are proud of our scientists, but we have been slow to promote and commercialise the intellectual property they produce.
As with many developing countries, South Africa faces the challenge of expanding critical skills and grappling with the competition for skills that we all face.
In South Africa, we have made human resource development particularly in science and technology a high priority – growing enrolment and graduation of postgraduates, growing enrolment of international students, and growing employment for permanent researchers at higher education institutions.
Both South Africa and Japan regard science and technology as fundamental to solving the difficult questions to do with economic growth, climate change and food security.
There is a strong need for our higher education systems to expand and enhance our research capability in those global challenge areas of climate change, biodiversity and food security. And, of course, space science is central to new research in all three of these areas.
Knowledge-intensive economies are connected through growing international research and cooperation networks. We seek to strengthen our international partnerships - both to enhance our own pursuit of new knowledge and to create an environment conducive to the transfer of technology.
We are very proud of our achievement in mounting a successful bid to build Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
The SKA is one of the great scientific projects of the 21st century, developed by scientists in 17 countries.
We will be building the capital-intensive portion of SKA here in South Africa.
We are very grateful for the support that we continue to receive from our African and other partners, including Japan, which set up an SKA Consortium, embracing business and industry.
In South Africa, we have utilised our collaboration with the international SKA consortium to best advantage - to develop expertise, to attract young people into science and technology careers and to develop expertise in industry.
Our young scientists and engineers have been able to jump to a leading role in many of the areas of development of the SKA, because of the excellent skills imparted by our universities and the expertise and experience that they have picked up from our partners.
Our industries, too, have been very innovative. They have designed and built innovative equipment for the telescope.
The SKA is an iconic project for world science. It brings together ground-breaking science with cutting-edge technological innovations.
The technologies that are being developed for the SKA and its precursors - such as signal processing, very fast computers and data transport, image processing and wireless - are key technologies in Information and communications technology (ICT) for the future.
The SKA creates a unique opportunity for young people to gain expertise in science and in key and generic areas of technology.
Thank you.
Address by Naledi Pandor MP, Minister of Science and Technology, at the Japanese-South African space-science colloquium, Pretoria
