Resident company helps bridge the digital divide with ICT for development expertise

	The Ungana-Afrika team (ltr): Rudi von Staden, Angel Kgokolo, Toni Eliasz, and Tshepo Thlaku

Ungana-Afrika, a recent addition to The Innovation Hub precinct, is addressing Africa's technology capacity crisis by building innovative ICT support programmes and tools for the development community, and its service providers.

This non-profit organisation's service areas provide a wide range of technology support and services, capacity-building and programme development across several levels of the development community within and outside of Africa. According to Executive Director, Toni Eliasz, part of Ungana-Afrika's vision is to address critical digital divide issues such as the technology capacity crisis and universal access by building innovative support programmes and tools to empower the development community.

The organisation's current focus areas are related to the incubation of development sector ICT support programmes, aimed at ensuring inclusive access for under-resourced networks. A major new initiative in this regard is the establishment of a network of rural ICT entrepreneurs in South Africa that can provide local government offices, businesses, farms and schools with access to appropriate services, technologies and support.

Eliasz explains, "Ungana-Afrika would provide the know-how and skills transfer and the entrepreneurs would then use what they have learned to run small businesses to provide commercial technology services to local communities". He adds that this move is in response to the urgent need in the rural areas for development that will provide commercial opportunities and reduce the incentive to migrate to urban areas.

In addition, rural businesses outside of the ICT sector are generally unaware of the business benefits now available through recent ICT developments, such as easier communication, improved access to information and reduced cost of doing business. The creation of a network of rural entrepreneurs is geared towards addressing this ICT 'vacuum'.

Ungana-Afrika have been providing ICT support, capacity-building and incubation services to NGOs in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) since 2003, with some of the ICT adoption projects undertaken in rural areas including the Rural Connectivity Project in the Eastern Cape and the Community Radio project in Mpumalanga.

According to Eliasz, however, for these services to be sustainable, a holistic approach is needed which does not focus exclusively on NGOs. To this end, Ungana-Afrika are currently looking for partners in their rural ICT SME development programme to help support the growth of the ICT sector in rural areas and facilitate development in other sectors through the enabling benefits of ICT. They have produced a concept paper setting out how the model will be structured and also hope to get this concept into incubation in the Hub's Maxum Business Incubator, after the current market research and feasibility study have been finalised.

All of the organisation's projects are part of targeted programmatic objectives. Assisted by long term funders, such as Soros Foundations and the Finnish Government, these projects are focused on a number of objectives, including accelerating the adoption of mobile technologies within the development community, and guiding developmental organisations to make informed technology choices and undertake appropriate spending to complement their visions and strategies.

"We function in a similar way to consultants. We can help NGOs to strategise properly and put together implementation plans; we contact and negotiate with technology service providers on their behalf, oversee project implementation, and even provide training. We understand development issues and the life of these organisations, and we also then understand technology enough to be able to assist them to make decisions that will add value to their visions and missions", says Eliasz.

According to Eliasz, Ungana-Afrika is now on a trajectory that is moving away from a purely not-for-profit model towards becoming what he terms 'social entrepreneurs' - a type of mixed model that keeps the values of an NGO, while still making a marginal profit to boost sustainability and growth. It is for this purpose that The Innovation Hub provides the ideal location for him and his team.

"Being able to interact with other small but innovative companies is quite important for us right now. It is an interaction that we were lacking before. We also think that we have a valuable contribution to make by introducing some of the softer values to the community. Many people who start up businesses make a huge contribution to their local communities and economies and we would like to remind the companies here of how they are already making an impact and how they can contribute even more to creating a positive change for people", he says.

For more information on Ungana-Afrika, contact Toni Eliasz on +27 84 3309515.