Centre of Excellence

welcome

The Telkom Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) is a research unit hosted within the the Department of Computer Science at the University of Fort Hare.

The research focus of the centre is on the use of computing technology for socio-economic development of marginalized and rural communities. The field-site of our research is a rural community of Dwesa in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

objectives

The research within the Centre of Excellence in undertaken on three-year cycle (as per the THRIP programme). The current cycle (2007 - 2009) is a logical development of the previous cycle which ended in 2006.

The initial (2004 - 2006 cycle) objective of the research was to develop and field-test a prototype of a simple, cost-effective, robust and integrated e-business/telecommunication platform. This platform was designed for deployment in marginalized and semi-marginalized communities in South Africa, where a large part of the South African population live. The lessons learned from that cycle included:

there is a need for stronger localization of the system toward lingustic and cultural contextualization
the integration of other eService (eGovernment, eHealth, eJudiciary) into the telecommunications platform is important
in order to the platform to better respond to the environmental transformations and the needs of the users, it is important to redesign the architecture as a distributed system