Proposed countermeasures to reduce the cyber divide – a South African perspective

Abstract

The digital divide has been a problem since the early days of information and communication technology (ICT) and it manifests itself in many forms, for example in a lack of access to the Internet, inadequate ICT skills and lack of language proficiency. Despite sustained efforts in the developing nations to reduce this divide, countries like South Africa still continue to suffer from the effects of the digital divide. In the current research the term ‘cyber divide’ is referred to as the divide that exists in a cyberspace. The cyber divide is an aspect of the digital divide that affects people in the cyber community or people who wish to operate in cyberspace (defined in this research as potential cyber users). In an attempt to bridge the digital divide in South Africa, this research is proposing a framework (cyber education framework) that should be considered as a possible countermeasure for decreasing the cyber divide in developing countries with particular reference to South Africa. The purpose of the proposed framework is to shift emphasis slightly from access divide to language and skill divide. Since the former has received numerous attentions since the early days of digital divide. This research project is a two-phase process. The first phase, which is this article, focuses on proposing the framework while the second phase will be the implementation and evaluation phase, which will be a future work.