The Department of Communications' (DOC's) key aim during African ICT Week is to build greater understanding of the role ICT can play in personal and business lives.
ICT Week began on Monday and will end this Sunday. The theme this year is: “ICT: tool for youth empowerment for sustainable development”.
The week is an initiative of the African Union, and is supported by the DOC.
“SA 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,” says the department.
It explains that the concept of an African ICT Week was created 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.”
The DOC also says the week is 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, says the department.
It adds that this year's theme is appropriate for SA, given that president Jacob Zuma has nominated 2011 as the year of job creation.
“ICT is clearly one of the tools that will help the youth end the cycle of unemployment that plagues SA.
“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 SA is hosting COP 17 in Durban, at the end of November, is highly significant.”
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