Johannesburg | Monday
AN eAfrica commission would ensure that every high school graduate on the continent left school ”e-literate”, Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri said on Sunday.
She was speaking at the formal opening ceremony of the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) Telecom Africa 2001 conference in Johannesburg.
”Education is important in crossing the digital divide. The first project of the eAfrica commission will be an e-school project to ensure that all our students are e-literate,” Matsepe-Casaburri said.
The project would be extended to ensure primary school graduates were computer literate within 10 years.
The commission is the information and communications technology leg of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad).
She also told conference delegates, who included a large number of her continental counterparts, that the reformation of key international organisations was an important part of South Africa’s foreign policy.
ITU secretary-general Yoshio Utsumi said much progress had already been made in putting Africans in touch with each other and the rest of the world.
”When Africa Telecom last took place (in 1998), there were barely two million mobile subscribers on the whole African continent. By the end of next month there will be 30-million — nearly one-and-a-half times the number of fixed-line subscribers.”
Utsumi said new technologies and services — such as mobile telephone, satellite communications and the shift from analogue to digital — was driving down costs and making information and communication technology globally accessible.
”It is therefore time to set ourselves a new goal. That goal is: by the end of the decade, virtually the whole of mankind should be brought within easy reach of modern means of telecommunications, including the Internet.”
Governments and regulators had a duty to make sure telecommunications services were accessible to everyone, he said.
”But we all — whether in government or the industry — have a responsibility to make sure that access to telecommunications services is priced reasonably, making not just the technology but also the services available and affordable to all sectors of society.”
Telecommunications services, he said, underpinned not just the global economy, but the very lives of ”us all.” – Sapa