Transcript Harnessing S&T for Africa`s Development: the role of ICT

Harnessing S&T
for Africa’s Development:
the role of ICT
Barry Dwolatzky
Professor
School of Electrical & Information Engineering, Wits University
Director: Joburg Centre for Software Engineering
Primary wealth-creating assets
 200 years ago: Land and Labour
 Past 200 years: Capital and Energy
 Present: Information and Knowledge
 Recent technological developments have
transformed wealth-creating work from
physically-based to “knowledge-based”
Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) in Africa
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After years of being an information and communication technology laggard
relative to other developing regions of the world, Africa has been pushed to the
forefront in a new information revolution, thanks to mobile communications.
This period has also witnessed considerable mobility in the information and
communication technology rankings of different African nations.
As an analytical framework, the “digital divide” does not accurately describe what
is happening on the continent and may lead to policy choices that are harmful to
Africa’s future.
Tim Kelly
Head: Strategy and Policy Unit, International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva,
Challenges facing ICT in Africa
 Indigenous versus imported technology –
both hardware and software
 Competing on a “flat world”
 ICT Research Capacity – there are fewer ICT
professors in Africa than in a medium-sized
US university
 Developing appropriate skills – multi-skilled
experts
From Prof Marwala’s presentation
 Areas Critical for Africa’s Development : ICT
 Connectivity
 We are already making great strides. New international links +
mobile
 Computing
 Cloud Computing (with good connectivity) offers solution
 Internet
 Mobile Internet
From Prof Marwala’s presentation
(continued)
 Areas Critical for Africa’s Development : ICT
 Broadband
 Much still to be done
 Digitization
 ????
 Computational/Artificial intelligence
 Indigenous R&D needed
 Outsourcing
 Need to compete on reliability and quality
 Call centres
 Huge opportunity – but progress is being made
Another huge opportunity
 “Smart Grid”
 Traditional Power Grids designed to carry energy
 Bring large amount of information onto the grid
 Offers great prospects of using energy more
efficiently
 Can discover “African Solutions” to this global
challenge