The relationship between access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and poverty in South Africa

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The National Development Plan (NDP) recognises access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as a hindrance towards economic advancement in South Africa and lists universal access to broadband services as an enabling milestone towards reducing poverty (National Planning Commission 2011: 149). In many respects South Africa has made tremendous progress with access to basic voice telephony, as a result of the rapid expansion of mobile service providers, mainly due to convenience and the introduction of pre-paid telephony. However, with respect to other elements of ICT, especially access to services that require broadband infrastructure, South Africa has not made much progress over the past decade. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the relationship between access to ICT and poverty in South Africa in order to establish whether any meaningful correlations exist. The paper furthermore attempts to identify those areas in South Africa that are characterised by both high levels of poverty, and low levels of access to ICT. There is a strong negative correlation between the geographic spread of access to ICT and the geographic spread of poverty in South Africa. In other words, areas where poverty are relatively high are areas likely to experience relatively low access to ICT, conversely, areas where poverty are relatively low are likely to experience relatively high levels of access to ICT.