The Google Charitable Giving Fund of the Tides Foundation has made a grant of
$750 000 to, the Tertiary Education and Research Network of SA (Tenet), to assist South African universities boost Internet and IT services.
According to a statement by Tenet, the grant must be spent within two years, and it comes with reporting requirements. “It will not be used to subvent ordinary operating costs, but to fund projects that will be of enduring benefit to the universities,” it says.
Tenet says a small steering committee will advise it on the projects that will be mounted and supported, wholly or partially, from this grant and help to exercise management oversight over these projects.
“We will manage all projects and be the responsible accounting entity.”
The company believes that projects arising from this grant should benefit a number of universities and should develop institutional capacities and may require commitments from these institutions to ensure that they continue to reap the benefits after their projects life span.
South African universities have been hampered in their attempts to use the Internet for research and teaching by inadequate capacity, says the University of Zululand.
The university goes on to say the demand for Internet bandwidth has vastly exceeded supply, resulting in congested connections, unresponsive or sluggish Web browsing, and limited ability to access larger content, be it software, scanned manuscripts, or streaming audio and video.
Last year, the higher education and training minister, Blade Nzimande, said the capacity of universities to conduct research was of great importance as it would allow each university to have all its campuses connected at sufficiently high bandwidths.
“Funding enables shared production and distribution of teaching and learning materials, deployment of centralised administrative systems and processes for the efficient management of multi-campus institutions.
It also helps with access to high performance scientific computing facilities and other educational and research resources via the existing backbone and equitable Internet access to other research and education networks globally, he pointed out.
Google's funding follows last year's government efforts of funding Internet access for higher education campuses with R28 million.
The project saw the backbone network being extended to points of presence in Grahamstown, Makhado, Middleburg Nelspruit, Pietermaritzburg, Polokwane, Potchefstroom, Vanderbijl Park and Witbank while Tenet secured at least 50 rural campuses to the presence points.
The funding follows visits last year by a Google manager to various South African universities, during which Guy Halse from Rhodes University and Sakkie Janse van Rensburg from UCT, and possibly others, suggested a visit to Tenet.
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