The SAKAN Navigation Page
SAKAN Site Navigation. Please click each icon to access the relevant pages.
HOME: Click to return to the SAKAN Home Page which summarizes the South African Challenges that SAKAN seeks to address.About: This page introduces SAKAN, who we are, and a summary of our vision, mission, objectives, and strategies.Document Downloads: This section provides a growing list of reference documents with hyperlinks to the originals.Sakan Partners: A tentative list of potential partners that may respond to SAKAN's "Call to Arms": Technology in the war against inequality and poverty. Sakan Contact: First contact with SAKAN. Responses will be conducted by confidential email until both parties agree on alternative modes of communications.
South Africa's Sustainable Development Goals: Discussing the use of ICT to facilitate the achievement of South Africa's Sustainable Development Goals.
South Africa Chapters:A fascinating evolutionary tale that is still evolving, narrated through our still evolving multimedia story-telling tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Please begin this journey of discovery of who we really are through the video summaries "Journey Of Man; A Genetic Odyssey!" by Dr Spencer Wells, or the BBC documentary narrated by Dr. Alice Roberts "The Incredible Human Journey". SAKAN collates these incredible stories in this collaborative story-telling section, adding to them details of today's immense challenges that deny access to this vital humanizing knowledge for too many descendants of those early human pioneers. Please click on each SAKAN chapter to access the story as it develops, or add to it in the ancient spirit of collaboration that led to our Out of Africa success.
South Africa: The still unfolding story of human evolution told by the collaborative efforts of the descendants of Lucy from Africa's Rift Valley, Mrs Ples from Sterkfontein, and our recently unearthed "ancestral cousin" from Morocco. Please click the map to access this fascinating unfolding story.South Africa's Triple Threats: This SAKAN page provides a detailed review of South Africa’s Triple Threats of Inequality, Poverty and Unemployment, from which highly focused evidence and knowledge-based intervention strategies can be developed. The “Trickle-down” philosophy of development has been ineffective.South Africa's ICT Sector: South Africa’s ICT sector has a proud history of early adoption and innovation, but has largely failed to provide the information and knowledge needs of the nation’s 55.5% population living in poverty. SAKAN seeks to redress this shortcoming through direct application of ICTs and related 4IR technologies.
South Africa and the 4IR: SAKAN believes that technological developments are not revolutionary, they are progressive evolutions of the cognitive development that emerged in South Africa some 100,000 years ago. The revolution is how humans engage with technology, the focus of these SAKAN pages.
Educating S. Africa for the 4IR: South Africa’s political history has had devastating impact on national education outcomes – just 6% of primary school enrollments graduate each year (Van Zyl, 2015). These SAKAN pages begin the search for 4IR technological solutions that will reverse this alarming situation. SAKAN Solutions: An SA public broadband access solution similar to the Brazilian LAN House model is proposed. This model helped raise Brazil’s household Internet penetration to 54% in 2017 (10% in South Africa). A concept paper, supported by extensive statistics and anecdotal evidence is provided. BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE SAKAN SITE: The SAKAN concept and this on-line tool to promote and manage it, is a dynamic and evolutionary work in progress that may never reach a conclusion but may change its characteristics and structure to keep pace with our evolutionary 4IR world. The starting point of the SAKAN concept was the desire to trace the history of human communications and its impact on human development prior to, during, and after the numerous "Out of Africa" migrations that began before the emergence of modern humans and increased in frequency and scale after their emergence as a distinct species. The "Out of Africa" migrations have returned with a vengeance in our modern technologically-driven world, joined by numerous other human migrations from all geographic regions with extremes of social injustices. The tragedies of these new migrations are very visible through our modern information-sharing technologies, and should warn us that no human society is immune from the consequences of social injustices. The ability to share information and knowledge for survival and growth must have been central to this human migratory process that created today, and can be equally effective in solving today's numerous social challenges. The research question that led to the SAKAN concept was simply: “If the ability to share information and knowledge for survival and growth emerged in Africa more than 200,000 years ago, what caused the original creators of Information Systems (IS) still residing in Africa to fall so far behind in this modern information age?”
In attempting to seek answers to this question, it became patently clear that modern ICTs, the core technology of the 4IR, are both the results of this human evolutionary progress, and the tools for its discovery and further evolutions into an unknown and uncertain human future. Researching the past must begin with a full understanding and use of the technologies themselves in their modern iteration. The vast disparities in access and ability to use these technologies have contributed to the immense social challenges that the world, and South Africa in particular, experience today. To address these complex and interconnected human social frailties, the SAKAN concept underwent a fundamental change, a “fuzzy logic” approach that attempts to link each component of an extremely complex puzzle to the the technologies that offer effective solutions to these human challenges. The abuse and/or inability to access and use these technologies exacerbates the multi-faceted challenges facing humanity.
This SAKAN Site Navigation Page is an attempt to establish order in this complex challenge of linking technology, specifically the ICTs, to the numerous social challenges that afflict South Africa and many nations worldwide. The “chapters” of this SAKAN “book” will evolve as the concept progresses. This page provides the first links to the SAKAN contents, an attempt to avoid the messiness of extensive site navigation tools. Please click on each section icon to access the pages, and return to this navigation page, or the “Home” page, to continue your engagement with the SAKAN concept.
In attempting to seek answers to this question, it became patently clear that modern ICTs, the core technology of the 4IR, are both the results of this human evolutionary progress, and the tools for its discovery and further evolutions into an unknown and uncertain human future. Researching the past must begin with a full understanding and use of the technologies themselves in their modern iteration. The vast disparities in access and ability to use these technologies have contributed to the immense social challenges that the world, and South Africa in particular, experience today. To address these complex and interconnected human social frailties, the SAKAN concept underwent a fundamental change, a “fuzzy logic” approach that attempts to link each component of an extremely complex puzzle to the the technologies that offer effective solutions to these human challenges. The abuse and/or inability to access and use these technologies exacerbates the multi-faceted challenges facing humanity.
This SAKAN Site Navigation Page is an attempt to establish order in this complex challenge of linking technology, specifically the ICTs, to the numerous social challenges that afflict South Africa and many nations worldwide. The “chapters” of this SAKAN “book” will evolve as the concept progresses. This page provides the first links to the SAKAN contents, an attempt to avoid the messiness of extensive site navigation tools. Please click on each section icon to access the pages, and return to this navigation page, or the “Home” page, to continue your engagement with the SAKAN concept.
The South African Story will continue: Where did we go wrong? With the deep ancestral history of South Africa as told by all humanity’s ancestors through their fossilized remains, spanning the period 300,000 before the present era (BP), to the migratory return of the now multi-cultural and multi-ethnic descendants of Africa about 1,500BP. The question “where did we go wrong?” must be asked before we can find solutions to South Africa’s triple threats of inequality, poverty and unemployment as depicted in the slides below. The SAKAN initiative seeks answers to this question, answers which will in turn promote the use of humankind’s foremost innovation - the ability to share increasingly complex and sophisticated developmental information and knowledge across all geographic and human barriers. South Africa needs to appropriate the immensely powerful technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) to drive these corrective actions, beginning with the nation’s future generations of citizens – the children! The alternative will be that South Africa will become a victim of the 4IR.
