Development of an ICT road map for eservices in rural areas

ICTs, driven by the convergence of computers, telecommunications and traditional media, are crucial for the knowledge-based economy of the future. The rapid technological changes have resulted in different ideas being suggested for the expected ICT applications. As a result, different e-Service applications have being developed as a way to foster ICT developments. However, ICT applications deployed at the moment may not be able to sustain the rural communities in maybe 10 years or more to come. The paper considers the past, analyzes the present and conduct surveys to gain insight into the future. Based on all of this information, the research tries to provide an ICT road map for what is to come. What kind of applications can we develop now to cater for the technological changes, so that the ICT applications developed today would still be compatible with those developed in years to come? The Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL) is used as the case study in this paper and some interviews and literature review are done to get different ideas on the future of ICTs.