Out-Law News 2 min. read
12 Feb 2015, 2:41 pm
Science and technology minister Naledi Pandor said the research programme will be centred around the establishment of an IBM research laboratory in Johannesburg in April 2015, which “will focus on advancing smarter decision making, analytics, cloud, and next generation infrastructure”.
The partnership also commits IBM to investing 700 million rand (ZAR) ($59m) in a programme that includes “academic, enterprise development and research components”, Pandor said.
Pandor said the partnership is “significant” because it is the first time an international company has invested in R&D in support of South Africa’s ‘broad-based black economic empowerment’ (BEE) policies.
BEE policies include measures aimed at empowering more black people to own and manage businesses. Enterprises are regarded as ‘black-owned’ if 51% of a company “is owned by black people, and black people have substantial management control of the business”. South Africa is encouraging foreign multinationals to incorporate BEE support when considering investing in the country.
South Africa’s ICT research, development and innovation strategy “has grown since ICT was identified as one of the key technology missions in the 2002 National Research and Development Strategy (82-page / 1.18 MB PDF),” Pandor said. “Over the past six years the government has invested ZAR 85m ($7.2m) in the strategy each year. IBM’s investment will greatly increase R&D investment by the private sector.”
A joint report published in 2012 by the World Bank and African Development Bank, with support from the African Union, said: “ICT innovations are delivering home-grown solutions in Africa, transforming businesses, and driving entrepreneurship and economic growth”. The report said that, at the start of 2012, Africa’s mobile telephony market was “bigger than either the EU or the US. Some 68,000 kilometres (km) of submarine cable and over 615,000 km of “national backbone networks” had already been laid to boost connectivity across the continent, the report said.
In April 2013, South Africa’s government published a 10-year ICT research, development and implementation roadmap (43-page / 26.2 MB PDF) aimed at increasing public and private investment in ICT research, development and innovation. Broadband infrastructure and services was among key areas identified for further investment and development. The roadmap said “ICT R&D... serves as an anchor point for attracting increased public and private investment”.
Last May, IBM announced the opening of two new mainframe ‘cloud innovation centres’ in Kenya and South Africa to “help expand big data and cloud computing across the continent”. IBM said it expected to spend some $3.47 billion on high value infrastructure projects in Africa in 2014, where private companies, IT partners, public sector heads and academics were “anxious to better understand how technology can help transform their processes”.
Latest figures from the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA), published last month, indicated that total infrastructure funding commitments in Africa increased for the second year running in 2013, with the ICT sector among the key beneficiaries.
The ICA said commitments reported by its members, including the G8 nations, South Africa, African Development Bank, Development Bank of Southern Africa, European Commission, European Investment Bank and the World Bank Group, were up 35% compared with 2012, reaching a record level of $25.3bn.
