The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say, and SA`s IT skills dilemma seems to bear this out.
Government officials and industry leaders are issuing more and more calls for the development of IT skills for the good of the country as a whole, and the ICT sector in particular. To do so means starting at grassroots level, during the formative years of schoolchildren.
Everyone agrees that children need exposure to the right sort of ICT equipment at an early age, to be taught by informed teachers, and to be assisted through tertiary education and into a job if we are to grow the sort of ICT skills pool we`ll need in future.
Sadly, while the goals are the same, it seems few can agree on the right way to put skills development into action.
Projects are launched and canned; school IT labs are rolled out and left to stagnate; underpaid teachers leave the profession in droves; committees debate skills development programmes at great cost to the taxpayer and industry sponsors without achieving much; and year after year, tens of thousands of young people emerge into the market none the wiser about ICT.
The only positive spin-off could be that every such project necessitates the hiring of public servants to manage it or administrators to run it while it lasts. So at least some jobs are created - if not the right ones.
To the observer, it looks like nothing more than an expensive mess.
At cross-purposes
It appears that many schools` requests for ICT assistance disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole, never to be seen again.
Tracy Burrows, news editor, ITWeb
Of course, there are also shining success stories amid the mountains of red tape and failed projects. Certain IT companies have taken it upon themselves to sponsor and mentor school IT programmes or individual ICT students - apparently with great success.
Some provinces have launched viable ICT learning centres with the enthusiastic support of the communities in which they operate.
Bizarrely, some of the people involved in these successful projects claim to have offered their project model free to other provinces and been flatly rejected. Some organisations with low-cost IT hardware or software claim their offerings have been turned down in favour of more expensive options - which seems odd in light of the general shortage of funds in the education sector.
Principals claim they were never consulted about school infrastructure before IT labs were installed and never used, due to a lack of electricity.
Others bemoan the fact that none of the staff were taught to use or maintain the equipment, so the first system crash meant the end of the school`s IT programme. It appears that many schools` requests for ICT assistance disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole, never to be seen again.
Doesn`t anyone talk anymore?
Spend where it counts
Huge sums of money are likely wasted due to this duplication of efforts. The money saved on a single administrator`s salary could probably install two or three PCs in a school each month. Think of how many PCs could be rolled out if all unnecessary administration was done away with.
The money saved on just one gala event staged to boast about ICT skills development projects could cover the cost of building an entire school ICT lab, while the cost of a year`s teas, dinners and meetings held by administrators to plan ICT skills development could probably cover a year`s ICT training for teachers.
Surely, if everyone who cared about IT skills development got together in one room and developed a single plan driven by a single body with a single budget, there would be less expensive duplication of effort and a faster roll-out of IT labs.
And the money could be redeployed to where it`s needed.
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