Limpopo Business 2016-17 edition

OVERVIEW
ICT and telecommunications
Connecting rural areas is a priority for Limpopo authorities.
SECTOR INSIGHT
Ten schools are piloting an
Offline Content Solution.
• The Limpopo ICT Youth
Conference was held in
2015.
• An ICT Centre of
Excellence is to be
established in 2016.
Connectivity is difficult to achieve in remote rural areas, and
large parts of Limpopo are rural. One way of achieving
higher connectivity is to focus on schools and libraries.
The Universal Service and Access Agency of South Africa
(USAASA) has as its brief to provide ICT services to public and private
schools, hospitals and training colleges. Limpopo is one of five provinces
that USAASA concentrates on with respect to school connectivity:
more than R25-million has been spent since 2010 on this project and
more than 400 smart devices distributed.
Private telecommunications companies also have community responsibilities
in terms of the National Development Plan. They must
help connect under-serviced areas to the telecommunications and
Internet networks.
A National Library of South Africa (NLSA) project, supported by
Vodacom, will connect about 300 community libraries via VSAT and
Vodacom ADSL services. The project covers South Africa’s three most
rural provinces – the North West, Limpopo and Mpumalanga.
When national libraries started using an open-source system known
as Library Information Management System (LIMS), it was a good opportunity
to upgrade the more remote libraries. Meso ICT Solutions was
the company used by Vodacom and the NLSA to roll out the project,
which will also give community members in those areas better access
to the Internet (including teachers
and students). Each library has 14
work stations and Vodacom can
carry both fixed-line and satellite
connectivity.
The state is a big factor in the
ICT sector, both in terms of its
regulatory role, the incentives offered
to companies and in terms
of its own purchasing power
through national departments
and agencies.
The State Information
Technology Agency (SITA) supports
a wide range of national
and provincial departments and
municipalities across the province,
and is working on establishing
a comprehensive provincial
network. SITA played a role in the
NLSA/LIMS project.
SITA has a client base of more
than 5 000 offices and offers services
in WAN support, support
of the provincial mainframe, ICT
training and website development,
among others. A SITA initiative
to help all of South Africa’s
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