Sustainable development through local content in South Africa

Towards a Sustainable Development View of Local Content using ICTs in South Africa: A Key Priority in the National Information Society Strategy By, Steve Vosloo, Empowerment for African Sustainable Development (EASD). South Africa (SA) has a history of strong commitment to sustainable development. It is a signatory to the major international agreements such as Agenda 21 and the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development, and has entrenched the attendant themes and goals into its own policy frameworks. It is also home to an emerging information society (IS), and already there are a number of information and communication technology (ICT) policies in place to improve the penetration of ICTs in the country. As part of the drive to successfully build an IS in SA, the government is currently working on a national Information Society and Development Plan and Implementation Strategy. The intersections of sustainable development and the IS are clear, hence the prevalence of references to each other in many policies and laws. A strong area of convergence is local content—the locally-owned or adapted knowledge of a community— which is shown by the paper to be essential for integrated sustainable development, as well as being a key priority in the national IS strategy. By exploring the links between sustainable development and the IS, and describing projects that create and disseminate local content with the support of ICTs in this area of convergence, the paper proposes the need for a broader definition of local content in the IS strategy, one that is framed within sustainable development principles rather than the current context of arts, culture and heritage. This move towards a sustainable development view of local content supports a further recommendation made by the paper, which is that government should portray ICTs not as an end unto themselves, but rather as powerful new tools that can be used to support SA’s existing efforts towards sustainably meeting its development goals. This paper was published in A Developing Connection: Bridging the Policy Gap between the Information Society and Sustainable Development ISBN 1-895536-77-4 Terri Willard, Maja Andjelkovic, Steve Vosloo, Wainaina Mungai, Margarita Salas, Anusha Lall, Atanu Garai, Diogo André de Assumpção, Amira Sobeih, IISD, 2005. Online: IISD.

User comments

 Printable version