From the fringes: South Africa’s smart township citizens

Abstract

This chapter explores the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) practices of the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), a community based organisation working with informal settlement communities in Khayelitsha, on the south-eastern fringes of Cape Town, South Africa. Many communities within Khayelitsha rely on communal toilets for sanitation, and the maintenance thereof has been highly uneven in quality. The chapter focuses on the use of ICTs in the SJC’s advocacy work on the delivery of sanitation to informal settlement residents. Within the larger theme of citizen action, three main research areas were identified and explored: the appropriation of ICTs by the SJC’s field staff, the use of their Web 2.0-based social networking sites (SNS) in their advocacy work and digital mapping of portable communal toilets. The research interrogates the use of ICT as a strategic tool for knowledge-based community empowerment, with the aim of understanding how these emerging uses of technology could assist developmental work within this sprawling area. The research emphasises the roles of various actors, the roles played by different technologies and the relations between technology and people. The emphasis on agency reveals that technology is not enough to augment empowerment processes. Technology-organisational relations are enmeshed within an institutional frame, where the meaningful use of technology requires a repositioning of network relations, in order for it to fulfil its potential as an empowerment tool.