Technology Access Centres and Community Development : Selected Cases of the Eastern Cape and Gauteng Provinces of South Africa

Despite the huge potential of information and communication technology (ICT) to assist communities to improve the lives of citizens in different ways through community development initiatives, there are still examples of failing ICT access centres while the number of sustainable e-centres is on the rise. Researchers in this area report success factors and impediments. Pre-eminent amongst the success factors are that integrative and collaborative approaches to community development while organizations deploying ICT to communities single-handedly are unable to sustain the continuity of the e-centres. Multi-stakeholder partnerships in ICT delivery and skills development are increasing and communities are reaping the rewards of these efforts. This translates into the aggregation of both supply and demand. The direction of the South African e-skills agenda is towards a combination of approaches; top down, bottom up, inside-out (development of new approaches to development) and outside-in (stakeholder collaborations). The authors conducted qualitative research (interviews) at 14 e-community centres in four South African provinces, the Eastern Cape (EC), Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and the Western Cape (WC). However, this paper reports on data gathered in the EC and Gauteng Provinces due to the vast data available which cannot be reported in a single article. It is best to report the data in a few comparative articles. The article describes four successful and two failing centres. South Africa as well has several examples of failed ICT4D projects of centres, especially during the first 10 years of democracy (1994-2004). However, the second decade of democracy (2004 to 2014) has experienced improved performance by ICT or e-community centres and improved attempts at applying ICT for community development. During this last decade, South Africans, stirred by the reality of the first failed telecentres, changed development strategies in processes of implementing ICT4D. Original telecentres were replaced by e-community centres. These technology access centres offer problem-focused ICT skills and services to address socio-economic challenges such as unemployment and illiteracy. The objective of the study was to establish the reasons why the digital divide is chronic and still high in the EC and KZN (mostly rural and, according to the South African Telecommunications law, should be prioritized in ICT infrastructure deployment) provinces while digital inclusion is prevalent in the urban Gauteng and WC Provinces. The researchers aimed to explore the reasons why the Gauteng and WC e-centres are also succeeding in teaching e-skills in while in the EC and KZN these deleopments are slow. A semiotic analysis of selected online videos on the ICT centres was also undertaken, for elaborate information about the centres due to the fact that not many centre users were found at the centres during the site visits and also the fact that most interviewees did not provide much information about the centres and services offered. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze data. Results of the study indicate that four e-community centres, two in Gauteng and two in the EC, are succeeding in community development while one centre in Gauteng is operational but not highly successful, and one EC e-centre closed down and therefore failed to achieve its goal. The data provide reasons for e-centre success and failure. The successful e-centres provide development lessons for the failing centres to emulate. If published, the information will be a useful resource to the e-centre managers to learn more about why centres succeed and why others fail. The paper has been submitted to a journal for publication