Business Forum Heads of Government meeting, Kampala, Uganda
21 November 2007
Programme Director
Colleagues from the Commonwealth Countries
Director-General of the Commonwealth, Business Council, Dr Mohan Kaul
Distinguished guests
Ladies and gentlemen,
It is now widely accepted that information and communication technologies
(ICTs), permeate every aspect of our lives. ICTs are essential tools for
generating economic growth, creating jobs, fostering social development, and
thereby improving the quality of lives. New advances in ICTs are notably
changing lives mostly for the better, and transforming the way private and
public business is done.
Today's fast-paced society demands instant services and products to be
accessible anywhere in the world anytime of the day and so things like video on
demand, news broadcasting on mobile phones and information and content delivery
in real-time are, for some, no longer luxuries but fundamental commodities and
a way of life. Today's privileged digital generation is enjoying the fruits of
innovation and scientific breakthroughs. Computing power and storage capacity
continue to grow rapidly, as predicted in Moore's Law. These developments
confirm that the era of ubiquitous computing and pervasive networks has indeed
dawned.
These realities give a mixed sense of ecstasy and gloom. Ecstasy because we
appreciate the fact that ICTs have the potential to promote development and
economic growth, to foster innovation and improve productivity, and to make
easily available the rich store of global knowledge. They cause gloom, on the
other hand, because of the scourge of the "digital divide", as ICTs remain
inaccessible to the majority of the citizens of the world, especially in
Africa.
Of critical importance to us in the developing world is the ability to attract
significant foreign direct investment in ICT. We can accomplish this by
creating enabling frameworks to make the ICT market favourable to both local
and global markets by developing and implementing appropriate policies and
legislative and regulatory frameworks.
South Africa fully recognises the role of ICT as key to industrial and
economic development. Consequently, we have put in place a number of laws,
policies, programmes and national strategies aimed at supporting and building a
strong, vibrant and robust ICT industry. Our recognition of ICTs as catalysts
for economic growth is two-pronged: We recognise ICTs as business enablers,
which enhance productivity and efficiency, but we also see the need to
stimulate the ICT industry in its own right.
For this to be achieved, adequate institutional mechanisms, government
policies and interventions and strong industry participation are required. In
this regard, South Africa has implemented measures to support the growth of the
first economy, while progressively uplifting the second economy through
programmes such as the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South
Africa (AsgiSA), and the Joint Initiative on Priority Skills for South Africa
(Jipsa). The goal of these initiatives is to halve unemployment and poverty in
South Africa by 2014, and ICTs are key to our achieving these developmental
imperatives.
On the ICT sector-specific policies: South Africa endorsed the Information
Society and Development (ISAD) Plan and a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
policy earlier this year. The purpose of the Information Society Plan is to
advance South Africa's efforts to create "an inclusive, people-centred and
development-oriented Information Society."
While the ISAD plan deals mainly with the integration and co-ordination of
all government ICT initiatives, it also recognises the importance of ICT
research, development and innovation for supporting the knowledge economy. The
FOSS policy mandates all our government departments to begin considering
alternatives to proprietary software as a way of mitigating the high cost of
ICTs, and of stimulating local innovation. Furthermore, the ISAD plan provides
a direct response to some aspects of the Millennium Development Goals, the
Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action, as well as the Tunis
Commitment and Agenda for Information Society.
All these, ladies and gentlemen, call upon us to accelerate our efforts in
ensuring that every young person is equipped with knowledge and skills to use
ICTs, and that ICTs are fully integrated in education and health care services.
In a nutshell, the World Summit on Information Society Action Lines mandates us
to infuse ICTs in all aspects of society. But the gap between the ICT industry
players in the developed and the developing worlds is still a cause for
concern.
While we acknowledge that the 'knowledge-economy era' assumes every nation
to be a player in the global economy, the majority of the developing nations,
especially in Africa, are still grappling with the issues of access to ICT
infrastructure, human resource capacity, limited ICT skills; a lack of critical
mass in ICT research, development and innovation; inadequate access to
telecommunications and broadband and the regulatory environment and adequate
funding in terms of support for small, medium and micro enterprises in
research, development and innovation.
While we recognise the immense contribution that the international community
continues to make to Africa's development, we still believe there is room to
level the playing fields, specifically in the ICT arena. My Ministry is
pursuing a number of purposeful interventions, within the context of South
Africa's National Research and Development Strategy, which are aimed at
creating an enabling environment for the advancement of research, innovation
and development in ICT. In this regard, we have developed a national ICT
research, development and innovation strategy, which aims to promote
innovation, support entrepreneurship, improve ICT infrastructure and empower
people through world class research, a robust innovation chain and human
capital development.
The intended outcome of the ICT Strategy is to ensure the smart
proliferation of ICTs into other sectors of the economy, as well as an
indigenous ICT industry that is developing, growing, innovative and globally
competitive. Some of the interventions linked with this strategy include
directed research, development and innovation programmes in specified ICT
domains such as mobile and wireless technologies, open source software, human
computer interaction, human language technologies, high performance computing,
information security, as well as ICT application in areas such as e-health,
e-education, e-government and ICTs for independent living.
Our focus on these ICT areas comes from the realisation of their pertinence
to the unique socio-economic situation in South Africa, and similar situations
in the rest of Africa. We are convinced that through ICT research, development
and innovation activities, we are setting ourselves on course to addressing
areas of market neglect, and strengthening development on all fronts. As an
example, our mobile and wireless technology project is targeting mostly rural
areas in a research programme that deploys wireless mesh network technologies,
which we believe are the answer to connectivity issues for the entire
continent.
This project aims to investigate, develop and test solutions that take into
account the unique characteristics of marginalised groups across Africa. It is
envisaged that, once the technology and business models have been tested
successfully, wireless mesh network technologies could reach millions of
Africa's people. An important aspect of this project is that it inculcates a
sense of ownership in the targeted communities, through a concept called
"community-owned networks". The aim here is not only to encourage ownership and
responsibility, but also to ensure sustainability and the creation of lasting
legacies through local entrepreneurship development.
On the application side, the rise of mobile telecommunications in Africa
presents ample opportunity for innovation and application development in
respect of mobile handsets. With more than 208 million mobile phone subscribers
in Africa, there is abundant potential for the optimisation of these devices to
increase access to markets in the digital economy. Our Centre for High
Performance Computing in Cape Town and the South African National Research
Network are major projects, which my department is implementing through the
Meraka Institute. We are convinced that these cyber-infrastructure initiatives
are set to revolutionise research methods and assist in the discovery of new
paths to technological innovation in South Africa.
Our international and industry partnerships are also starting to bear fruit.
Within the context of the ICT Research, Development and Innovation Strategy, we
have managed to build and strengthen partnerships with multinational companies
such as Systems Application Products in the Systems Application Product
(SAP)/Meraka Unit for Technology Development. Meraka Institute and
Nokia-Siemens are involved in a joint wireless mesh network project being
implemented in a rural area in the Eastern Cape province.
Despite these and many notable successes in the ICT research, development
and innovation realm, we are still faced with the enormous challenge of
ensuring that our research, development and innovation efforts translate into
useful and usable new technologies, products and services, which can be
commercialised and thus boost the local ICT industry. To ensure co-ordinated
long-term planning, we developed a Ten Year Innovation Plan for South Africa.
One of the major initiatives proposed by the Ten-Year Plan is the urgent
establishment of the Technology Innovation Agency.
The value proposition for the Agency is to help close the gap between the
knowledge production base and the real economy. The agency is intended to
remove the barrier to the commercialisation of technological innovations by
consolidating the fragmented funding instruments we have today. Most
importantly, the Agency is destined to stimulate the development of
technology-based products, services and enterprises.
In closing, programme director, I would like to emphasise that all the
policies and projects alluded to are designed to leverage ICTs for business
development. South Africa has always understood that these imperatives can only
be achieved through proper and well-structured public-private partnerships.
Therefore, the participation of captains of industry and leaders of ICT
conglomerates is invaluable in building the ICT infrastructure. Let us join
hands and co-invest in ICT research, development and innovation programmes that
have the potential of building markets and business opportunities and producing
positive impacts on the lives of our citizens.
I hope this conference will go a long way in contributing towards the
efforts of turning Africa's "digital divide" into "digital opportunities".
Thank you.
Issued by: Department of Science and Technology
21 November 2007
Source: Department of Science and Technology (http://www.dst.gov.za)
