Internet-enabled mobile phones can people in the country – here in the near Cape Town – transfer money and communicate with the authorities. If the connection works.
If Sibukele Gumbo runs in her lab, she must cross a border. There is a limit without barrier, it is not between states and does not follow a well-defined line – only the road is bumpy at Idutywa and leads deeper into the undulating grasslands of the Wild Coast, a coastal county of the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa, in the middle in the former Transkei homeland. “Welcome to information-locked country,” says Gumbo, as we turn from the paved main road onto a rutted mud and gravel road – welcome in a country that is locked out from the modern flow of information. The aim of the computer scientist is to create this invisible border in the world, which runs between the Wild Coast and the information society.
next hill offers a view of hills on which undulates silvery-green grass. They are dotted with huts in light blue, mint green and garish purple. In between cows and goats trot on narrow trails. As idyllic landscape, so torn the social and economic reality. In the homelands the black African population during the apartheid era was largely excluded from the development of the rest of South Africa. Today in the region are up to 90 percent of the majority of the people of the Xhosa people belonging to unemployed or work only occasionally. The average income, which consists mainly of pension payments, social assistance and referrals for expatriate relatives, is at just over 90 € a month, the supply of running water and electricity is the exception.
For more than a week, the flagship project offline
Sibukele Gumbo and colleagues from the Centre of Excellence by the South African telecommunications company Telkom SA do the people here now provide new opportunities for social and economic participation – by connecting to the global mobile phone and data network. To this end they have set up a “Living Lab”, a sort of test laboratory, where researchers develop innovations with the involvement of future users. The Siyakhula Living Lab – Siyakhula means in the local isiXhosa language “we grow together” -. Includes five schools and villages in its catchment area, all together 25 square kilometers, inhabited by 25,000 people.
Keywords are projects like this have been around the 1990s. But with the rapidly increasing access to Internet and mobile telephony in the so-called developing countries, it can now be implemented in a wide scale. It has made a real scene, in which global companies like Nokia, Microsoft or SAP, global financial and economic organizations, government institutions and a huge number of start-ups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are involved. The abbreviation for the trend: ICT4D – Information and Communication Technologies for Development.
From health care, connection to economic cycles, education and democratic participation – for every problem area on the development agenda, there are appropriate online applications: farmers sell their potato crop by mobile phone via a trading platform directly to caterers. Slum dwellers coordinate their purchases via SMS on a central server. Individuals awarded a mouse click microcredit. “The revolution in information technology captures just starting,” predicts dongi Philippe, head of the sector of information and communication technologies (ICT) at the World Bank. “In a few years, the majority of Africans, Latin Americans, South Asians and people of other developing countries have a small mobile computer and you – connected to the internet”.