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A Decade of e-Development in South Africa: Sufficient for a “Services (R)evolution”?

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National Strategies to Harness Information Technology

Part of the book series: Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management ((ITKM))

Abstract

South Africa’s history is one of migration and mobility, due to successive centuries of continental migrations, its colonial history, the separate development policies pursued between 1948 and 1990, its social diversity and its relative political openness. During previous centuries, migration and mobility were key features of South Africa with workers migrating from rural areas and neighbouring states to the mines and towns to work, often in menial, low-income jobs. In the late nineteenth and twentieth century, mining and subsequent manufacturing activity laid the foundations for the growth of a services economy. Following democratisation in 1994, South Africa became an attractive destination for the mobile middle class and for people working in service industries across the continent. These and other trends laid the foundation for the emergence of an era of mobile communications in Africa.

This chapter builds on the work The State of e-Development in South Africa: A view from the end of the first decade of the 21 st century by the same authors, a 2010 LINK public policy paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

     Ekurhuleni and Tshwane are two of the three metropolitan municipalities in Gauteng province. Ekurhuleni incorporates the historical manufacturing hub of the East Rand, while Tshwane incorporates the city of Pretoria and the administrative centre of national government. eThekwini is in the KwaZulu-Natal province and includes Durban; Nelson Mandela Metro is in the Eastern Cape province and includes Port Elizabeth.

  2. 2.

     Ekurhuleni and Tshwane are two of the three metropolitan municipalities in Gauteng. Ekurhuleni incorporates the historical manufacturing hub of the East Rand towns, while Tshwane incorporates the city of Pretoria and the administrative centre of national government.

  3. 3.

     Languages are Afrikaans, English, IsiNdebele, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Sesotho, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda and Xitsonga.

  4. 4.

     Tertiary Education NETwork, a consortium for universities that buys bandwidth at wholesale prices.

  5. 5.

     Through its indirect subsidiary Financial Network Services Pty Ltd. (Africa).

  6. 6.

     Two of the top five companies in the IT sector.

  7. 7.

     CMMI or Capability Maturity Model Integration is a framework for software management, where at the initial level 1, performance of the software is unpredictable; while at the highest level 5, software engineering process improvement is institutionalised.

  8. 8.

     GERD is the gross domestic expenditure on research and development as a percentage of GDP.

  9. 9.

     The activity index, used in the National Science Indicators Database, Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, gives an indication of a country’s research effort in particular fields relative to the world average, with an activity index of 1 indicating equivalence between the research effort for the country and the world average.

  10. 10.

     Additional languages include IsiNdebele, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda and Xitsonga.

  11. 11.

     MICT SETA  =  Media, Information and Communications Technology Sector Education and Training Authority.

  12. 12.

     AMPS = All Media and Products Survey conducted by the South African Advertising Research Foundation.

  13. 13.

    The cost of a 3G card is lower than the cost of an ADSL connection, while mobile broadband can be bought in smaller units than ADSL.

  14. 14.

    “Mahala” is the Zulu word meaning “free”.

  15. 15.

     ANC is the African National Congress and DA is the Democratic Alliance.

  16. 16.

    Business Sophistication Measure: The market research presents seven BSM categories, of which BSM 1 is largely informal, BSM 7 is the most formalised of SMEs and BSM categories 3–6 present increasing levels of formality.

  17. 17.

    People First.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Lucienne Abrahams

  2. World Wide Worx, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Arthur Goldstuck

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  1. Lucienne Abrahams
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Correspondence to Lucienne Abrahams .

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    Nagy K. Hanna

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    Peter T. Knight

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Abrahams, L., Goldstuck, A. (2012). A Decade of e-Development in South Africa: Sufficient for a “Services (R)evolution”?. In: Hanna, N., Knight, P. (eds) National Strategies to Harness Information Technology. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2086-6_4

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