This year’s African Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Week will take place between 14 and 20 November with the theme of “ICT: tool for youth empowerment for sustainable development”. The week is an initiative of the African Union, and is supported by the Department of Communications.
South Africa has been a member of the African Union (the successor of the Organisation of African Unity) since it was launched in Durban in 2002.
South Africa works closely with the Union and, in particular, cooperation on the telecommunications front has been sustained. In November 2009, the Department of Communications hosted the African Union Extraordinary Communications and information Technology Ministerial Conference, which led to the adoption of the Oliver Tambo Declaration.
Subsequently, South Africa was a member of the Conference’s Bureau and Steering Committee, and also contributed to the Fourteenth Ordinary Session of the African Union Summit, whose theme was “Information and Communications Technologies in Africa: Challenges and Prospects for Development”.
The concept of an African ICT Week was born at the World Summit of the Information Society in Tunis, November 2005, which identified ICT as a way to promote sustainable development and cooperation within countries, regions and internationally. An African ICT Week was seen as a way to promote the Summit’s ideals within Africa.
African ICT Week offers a chance not only to reflect on how far bringing ICTs to the people has come. One of the department’s key aims during this week is to build greater understanding of the role that ICT can play in personal and business lives. It’s also a way of getting behind the African agenda of creating a prosperous, integrated information economy that competes successfully on the world stage.
Globally, Africa is being seen as the next growth frontier, and it is already beginning to attract greater amounts of foreign investment in line with its rising prosperity. However, in order to capitalise fully on this positive trend, the continent needs to improve its telecommunications infrastructure while making it much more affordable to use ICTs. In addition, cultural, gender and language barriers need to be surmounted in order to make the opportunities offered by ICT available to all Africans.
This year’s theme is very appropriate for South Africa given that President Zuma has nominated 2011 as the year of job creation. In light of the link between broadband penetration and economic prosperity, the Department of Communications signed an historic ICT Industry Competitiveness and Job Creation Compact with ICT industry leaders on 31 July 2011 to help create 1 million direct and indirect new jobs by 2020.
ICT is clearly one of the tools that will help the youth end the cycle of unemployment that plagues South Africa.
As this year’s theme also makes clear, ICT has a great role to play in enabling development that is sustainable because it allows both collaboration and business transactions to take place virtually, without the need for carbon-producing travel. In this regard, the fact that South Africa is hosting COP 17 in Durban at the end of November is highly significant.
The Department of Communications calls on all South Africans to celebrate and observe African ICT Week as a way to bridge the digital divide, help more people gain access to these technologies and so build the kind of South Africa everyone will want to live in.
