“The world is moving from voice into data and the cloud is becoming ever more important as a location for information.”
That’s the kind of statement we usually hear from the marketing teams at big networking companies, or analysts promoting their next reports. But today it’s the being spoken by Doctor Miriam Altman, commissioner on the National Planning Commission in the Office of the Presidency, who addressed the subject of getting more people in South Africa online during a keynote address at the 2014 Wired Women Conference in Rosebank, Johannesburg.
Dr Altman’s keynote addressed how South Africa should work towards joining this movement and where the National Development Plan comes in in helping the country do so to achieve its targets for growth, employment and the reduction of poverty in South Africa. “If South Africa doesn’t get on board, we move behind. If the majority of the population is not online, they move even further behind and we entrench inequality.”
“There are global opportunities to leverage tech for jobs and growth, for example in IT-enabled services. If you look at countries like India, they created something like two million jobs in a decade, created a lot of diversity in those industries and we could be emulating that model,” she points out.
“We’re strong in the industries that are actually growing the fastest globally. From a social policy perspective, if we don’t ensure that there is enablement of the population, then again we’re going to be leaving the vast majority of the population behind, both from the perspective of getting out sister public services, access to markets, jobs and being able to participate in this new economy.”
“There’s a two way kind of dynamic here,” explains Dr Altman, “we won’t have faster growth if we don’t have an inclusive growth path, that’s not a “nice-to-have”, it’s an essential.”
Dr Altman says it’s all about getting the population to participate in fundamental transformative technologies which are accessible but aren’t priced in the right way and not readily available.
“Unless that’s done, we won’t achieve our higher growth and employment aspirations more generally,” she concludes.
