The high cost of telecommunications, especially broadband, is hampering the use of the Internet for development purposes, says civil society organisation Southern African NGO Network (SANGONeT).
"The high cost of access limits the use of the Internet as a civil society tool and stunts the growth of a culture to use technology as an information tool," SANGONeT deputy director Fazila Farouk told ITWeb.
Farouk says there are an estimated 100 000 civil society organisations in SA, most of which are community-based organisations, that could make use of the Internet as a tool for fund raising, advocacy, and working with other constituencies to share information and coordinate development priorities.
"Internet access is limited to a small sector of the population (about four million people in total) due to the high cost. Furthermore, we need broadband access as the applications that are needed for civil society work cannot be done using dial-up access only," she says.
Farouk says the US aid agencies are the most advanced in using the Internet as a development, fund raising and advocacy tool.
"Some 85% of all funds collected by the US following the tsunami disaster of last year were collected using credit card payments through Internet portals," she says.
On Monday, 24 October, SANGONeT will celebrate World Development Information Day - an even instituted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1972 to draw public attention to development problems and the importance of strengthening international cooperation to solve them.
The event will be held in Johannesburg, while a video conference link with Cape Town and Durban will enable participation from those two cities.
The objective of the event is to highlight the role and significance of information and communication in the South African nongovernmental organisation (NGO) sector and to profile specific initiatives aimed at improving its information and communication capacity.
Key speakers include Godfrey Mokate, newly appointed CEO of the National Development Agency, and Michael Gilbert of the Gilbert Center in Seattle. Gilbert is a non-profit online specialist who will talk about how NGOs can maximise their websites to achieve their development goals.
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