Executive Leaders of the information communication technology (ICT) industry
Representatives of our Labour organisations
Participants from State Owned Enterprise (SOEs) and other state agencies
Members of the media
Distinguished quests
Ladies and gentlemen
It is with great pleasure to welcome you to the 2011 Annual Information Society and Development Multi-stakeholder Forum, which takes place over two days.
Allow me to take this opportunity to welcome the Mr Brahima Sanou, the Director for the Telecommunications Development Sector at the International Telecommunications Union, who is here as our special guest. We are grateful to the Secretary-General for allowing him to visit our country to be part of this important occasion.
During his stay in South Africa, Mr Senou will also address the Communications Regulators Association of Southern Africa (CRASA) Annual General Meeting which is currently taking place in here Johannesburg. The CRASA AGM will culminate with the merger of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) postal and information communication technology (ICT) associations of regulators into a single entity, thereby maximising the value and benefits of a converged policy and regulatory environment.
On behalf of our country and government, I wish to congratulate Mr Senou on his recent appointment as Director of the BDT in October 2010. South Africa worked with other countries to campaign rigorously for his appointment. His appointment is important as it will ensure that the views of Africans and other developing world are represented in the corridors of the ITU and other related international platforms.
I also wish to express our sincere appreciation to our other speakers for availing yourselves and making time to be with us in the next two days.
It is my pleasure to welcome all of you, our distinguished participants, to this august event as a way to accelerate the partnership between the Department of Communications and the ICT industry, including labour and civil society.
Programme director,
We have invited you here to discuss the role of the ICT sector in sustainable rural development and job creation, which is also the main focus of our government and department throughout the this year.
Our engagement is also informed by our commitment to meet all sub-sectors of the ICT sector since the Deputy Minister and I were deployed to this portfolio in November 2010. This is also in line with the commitment I made in first public statement in November 2010. As you will recall, I outlined Six (6) key and immediate priority areas as follows:
1. Reconstructing the Department of Communication (DOC) to provide Policy Leadership by building internal capacity and competency.
2. Aligning our SOEs and state agencies’ focus with government priorities. Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), SENTECH and Telkom were identified as critical players in the attainment of national goals and have since received most of our attention to-date.
3. Migration of the television broadcasting services from analogue to digital technology by 2013. In this case, we have finalised the discussions on the Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) Standard, and are currently moving ahead with Infrastructure roll-out whilst finalising the manufacturing and distribution strategy for STBs.
4. Broadband access for all to ensure that we increase penetration to half the population by 2020.
5. Building an inclusive Information society and knowledge based economy which also encompasses the role of ICTs in rural development, including the creation of job opportunities for our people. The quest to create jobs will be complemented by the effort to e-skill the nation to be implemented through the e-skills Institute initiative.
6. With regards to Policy and Regulatory Reform for Convergence – we are working with ICASA to ensure that a pro-competitive regulatory framework is implemented in the telecommunications sub-sector. This will spur on the uptake and usage of ICTs, especially broadband, across the country. We will also embark on processes to develop a comprehensive, forward looking spectrum policy environment.
In the postal sector, we will finalise the South African Post Office Act and the implementation of the Post Bank Act which was recently signed into law by the President. We will roll-out Post-Bank outlets, as the dedicated bank of the unbanked section of our communities, in rural areas. For the first time, the poor in rural and urban settlements will be able to access banking without having to travel to the cities and towns.
In his State of the Nation Address early this year, President Zuma, stated that a partnership between government and business was central to the attainment of the social and economic goals of our country. As you will recall, the President has recently convened the national summit of government and business to further discussions on the creation of jobs across all sectors of the economy.
Our meeting here today should thus be seen as part of broader government endeavour to engage with stakeholders, business, labour and civil society to openly debate the role that out sector can play in economic growth and development, a new trajectory that includes sustainable employment creation.
In light of these challenges, the theme of this year’s event is the Role of ICT’s in Rural Development and Job Creation. The department has already developed an ICT Rural Development Strategic Framework to guide us as we invest resources to achieve this national strategic goal. The Strategy also seeks to align our work with the overall government strategic outcomes as contained in the Medium Term Strategic Framework.
This new strategic thrust is also supported by a Steering Committee comprising the Departments of Rural Development and Land Reform, Public Works, and Arts and Culture; Science and Technology and the state agencies, Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa (USAASA) and National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa (NEMISA). Other entities in the sector will also be invited to contribute to this national effort.
Consistent with the drive to establish partnerships with all role players, we have invited you here to discuss the draft strategy. We trust that your input will enrich its focus as well as the implementation plans. Your buy in is important to ensure all of us contribute to the implementation of the final strategy.
Allow me to turn to the elements of the Draft ICT Rural Development Strategic Framework which will be presented in detail here today. Our draft strategy seeks to achieve the following strategic outcomes as indicated in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) discussions:
- Universal access and connectivity in the rural areas, and the Use of technology to meet the social and economic needs of our people
- Universal access to quality and affordable services is central to the role of ICTs in facilitating sustainable development of rural communities.
The strategy is also aligned to the New Growth Path targets particularly government’s commitment to create 100 000 jobs by 2020 in the development sectors such as Information and Communications Technologies, higher education, healthcare, mining-related technologies, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. In this regard, the ICT sector contribution will be in the four following identified areas:
- Public employment and recycling interventions geared towards greening the economy
- Effective programmes, institutions and systems to diffuse new technologies to SMEs and households
- Significant support for Research and Development, education and training linked to developing South Africa as the higher education hub for the continent
- Continuous efforts to reduce the costs of infrastructure and services thus increasing access and usage of broadband services.
The ICT Rural Development Strategy will also anchor around attracting capital investment in broadband infrastructure and services in rural and areas. This will be linked to spectrum licensing to ensure that government uses the radio frequency spectrum resource to direct investments in rural areas.
Furthermore, ladies and gentlemen, the strategy is developed within the context of the empowerment of rural communities and has to include programmes that would encourage civil society, to promote the uptake and usage of ICT services and infrastructure. Effective access and utilisation of ICTs by civil society will also help deepen our hard earned democratic dispensation as well as foster social cohesion.
In the over all, the strategy can be summed up in terms of Ten ( 10) key priorities and these deal with several areas that are liked to yield high impact:
- Creation of economic opportunities – Aiming at ensuring that the ICTs infrastructure and services roll-out create and generate chances for poor individuals, households, and communities to earn improved incomes through jobs created and self employment where possible
- Investment in human capital – ICTs should be able to create a platform for the provision of education and training needed by rural communities to engage in the economy
- Provision of income security – Provision of safety nets through ICTs for the most vulnerable, to ensure that vulnerability associated with disability, age, and illness does not send poor individual, households and communities into destitution
- Enabling the provision of basic services – The ability to pay for services or the lack thereof should not deter the poor from getting basic services, particularly of information dissemination in nature, therefore supporting the revival of PITs, cyber-labs, and an evenly spreading community radio and television broadcasting services
- Improving healthcare – ICTs Rural Development Strategy has to ensure that poor children grow up healthy by providing relevant content through either radio, cyber-labs, and PITs, to ascertain that all individuals and communities are provided with healthcare information through these platforms
- Ensuring access to ICT Centres / Assets – Community radio and television, cyber-labs, PITs, and tele-centres infrastructure roll-out to communities should be viewed as public infrastructure and assets belonging to communities, both to improve economic and social security, including providing the basis for economic engagement in the long run
- Social Inclusion and social capital initiatives – The focus in this instance is on strengthening social capital, especially for the poor to expand their networks and ensure that they have access to information
- The investment and returns strategy seeks to combine programmes and projects to ensure a more inclusive and integrated society, based on the development of more integrated community structures and engagements across class and race, including visible solidarity in such communities and society at large
- Environmental sustainability – This would require programmes that will through ICTs help link increasing economic opportunities for the poor to the provision of radio programmes that inform communities to protect and rehabilitate ecosystems, reverse environmental degradation, promote eco-tourism, empower the poor and the rich to extract from the environment sustainably and to facilitate equitable access to the planet’s economic resources such as land and water
- Creation of good governance structures – This will ensure proper use of public funds, and encourage growth of the ICT’s sector to promote effective and efficient delivery of public services, inclusive of establishing and protecting the rule of law
Government will play a leading role in the creation of the necessary environment to allow the private sector and civil society to create jobs thereby contributing towards sustainable development. Interventions will be needed across the value chain of the ICT sector, including but not limited to:
- Broadband infrastructure, encompassing the implementation of projects on connectivity to schools, further education and training centres, traditional institutions, clinics and health centres
- Creative Industries innovations such as animation and content digitisation
- Electronics manufacturing with an intention to create more than 24 million jobs through the digital terrestrial television set-to-box manufacturing scheme
- ICT SMME development including business incubation and e-cooperatives growth targeting the unemployed
- Business Process Outsourcing
- Postal services sector including the roll-out of Post Bank in areas in the country.
In the over all, we believe that this sector has a potential to create more than 150 million jobs over the medium-to-long-term. This will also increase the contribution of the sector to the GDP.
As the world economy recovers, this sector is poised for further growth. We have also put on the table a discussion on the long-term vision for sector. In this vision, we contend and project a high growth trajectory of about R250 Billion by 2020 from a mere R179 Billion by 2010. This exponential growth of the ICT sector will still be driven by the growth in the mobile communications market, including both voice and data services. With a low penetration of 11 percent in smart-phones, data services will grow even faster as demand for data increases.
The ICT services market has also contributed significantly to the growth of the telecoms market where we have observed that in 2007 the market grew from R31 billion to R45 billion in 2010. It is estimated that the data market will growth the fastest and it is estimated by 2015 the market will reach R24 billion. Increased competition regulation and the licensing of broadband spectrum will further spur on the growth of the data market. We envisage that the data market will grow to around R28 billion by 2020.
Lastly, we have committed that we will create an ICT Industry Wide Working Group on Job creation whose purpose is to facilitate and identify priority areas leading to job creation. The department will be capacitated to coordinate and evaluate the work of the industry working group and report to the Minister on the progress being made. Taking advantage of the Jobs fund announced by President Zuma in February this year, we must exploit these resources for the betterment of the lives of our poor communities.
We should do all this, with the understanding that we have an amazing opportunity before us, and working together and joining hands, we could become the change we want to see.
Thank you.
Source: Department of Communications
