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17 November 2008

Ms Claire Tillekaerts, Managing Director, Flanders Investment and Trade
Mr Tony Verbeke, President, Business Club South Africa
Mr Jan Rombouts, Executive Director, Belgian Campus
Dr Gwen Ramokgopa, Executive Mayor of Tshwane
Mr Jan Mutton, Ambassador of Belgium
Official representatives from the Belgian government
Distinguished guests
Students, parents
Ladies and gentlemen

It is a pleasure to be here.

On behalf of the South African government I thank the Belgian College for its contribution to the development of education and IT skills in South Africa. The opening of this new service centre is a positive development for the Belgian College. It is also a positive development for the private higher education sector as a whole.

As you will know, private tertiary education was not regulated prior to 1998. In the absence of regulation, excesses were evident in a number of institutions where there was poor quality in instruction, and a lack of accountability to students.

I am pleased that we have transcended many of those problems through effective regulation. To date, we have 81 registered and 13 provisionally registered private tertiary education institutions in the country offering a total of 320 programmes, including four doctoral programmes.

This means that there are far more private than public higher education providers. However, this does not mean that the majority of students are in the private higher education sector. The majority of tertiary students are in the public and not the private sector.

Yet private universities and colleges play a key role in widening access to higher education, and in government we have a particular soft spot for those private colleges like the Belgian College that are not for profit. South Africa needs a diversity of institutions and programme offerings to be able to respond to the demands of a diverse student population.

More than that, we need and welcome international support in the vast field of information and computer technology. I am quite sure that we can make much better use of technology to empower individuals, to promote economic growth and to reduce inequality. To make better use of technology we have to expand internet access and the spread of internet technology, commerce, and communication.

And we have begun to do so. For example, earlier this year the government provided funding to universities to expand their bandwidth some 35 fold. This is a vast increase in the speed and capacity of internet connections. The new network is up and running up here on the Highveld and is soon to expand to other universities. By mid 2009 the under construction oceanic Seacom cable, which runs up the east coast of Africa, will connect South Africa via the east coast town of Mtunzini to Europe as well as Mumbai in India. Universities currently rent space on the South Atlantic Telecommunications cable, SAT-3, which runs up Africa’s west coast. The new cable is expected to speed up the connection substantially.

It will not be a surprise to most of you here to hear that South Africa is the 20th largest consumer of IT products and services in the world and the leader of information and communication technology development in Africa. We lead especially in the field of electronic banking services, in revenue management, and in fraud prevention systems and we export to the world.

Our information communication technology (ICT) and electronics sectors are expected to continue showing strong growth in the future. So the establishment of this centre comes at an opportune time in our social and economic development. It will play a small but strategic role in helping us to achieve our ICT goals in higher education. We are living through an era in which a lack of necessary IT and computer skills is a serious constraint on our future prosperity.

Even though we are beginning to reach the targets set for the number of science, engineering and technology graduates in the higher education sector, only 5 000 information technology graduates graduate each year. These numbers fall short of projected industry needs. We therefore need to do all we can to increase our IT graduates and appeal to you and other institutions of a similar nature to assist us in this regard.

Having benefited from this Centre, Belgian College graduates will be better equipped to solve the many Information Technology challenges that employment in our industry will offer each day. We also hope that the research done here will have a much wider impact, in this Province, but also in our country.

I wish you all the best.

Issued by: Department of Education
17 November 2008