Development, use and potential contribution of appropriate ICT-based service systems to address rural transport related accessibility constraints - Emerging lessons from case studies in South Africa

Abstract

Rural environments suffer a number of constraints including high transport cost, irregular or unpredictable transport services, transport of low passenger and freight volumes, and low logistics service demand and supply. Rural residents, especially those residing in South Africa’s ex-homeland territories are spatially removed from employment and service centres and as a result experience the abovementioned constraints. To address specific rural transport and logistical problems, researchers at the CSIR’s Built Environment Unit have turned to a service system approach where ICT systems are developed to target and address a specific transport related problems. The use of such systems holds the potential to overcome such constraints, and could improve the general accessibility of rural households and enterprises (e.g. to services, peers and markets). During 2008-10 the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) Built Environment unit initiated a two (related) research projects: one focused on the development of a logistics brokering system that could address rural transport challenges facing local residents. The second, a healthcare application, dealt with supporting local home-based care workers that provide care for patients at home, whilst supplying vital health care statistics to health care professionals at the local clinic/hospital thus avoiding the need to travel frequently. Both these systems use a session-oriented service technology known as Unstructured Supplementary Services Data (USSD), to deliver the services between users, service brokers or facilitators and the end users. A service system framework was applied within a living labs context which positively affected the outcomes of the projects. These systems, and others like it, hold much potential to address transport related rural accessibility challenges.