Towards a resilience framework for integrating and using mobile technologies in South African public rural schools: Theoretical considerations

Abstract

South Africa has seen research and development (R&D) efforts in Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) to provide rural schools with mobile technologies for improving the quality of teaching and learning. The challenge however is that most of the interventions fail when the project team withdraws from the beneficiary schools. The failure of the ICT initiatives in public rural schools has led to studies that aim to understand the problems related to the sustainability of these interventions, however, despite all that, ICT initiatives continue to fail in these schools. While sustainability studies have historically focused on the ICT initiatives and factors impacting on their sustainability, in contrast, this study focuses on building resilience of the education system in a way that enables the school to thrive when using ICTs. Using a Design Science Research Method, the overall study seeks to identify existing sustainability and resilience frameworks for purposes of developing a resilience framework and guidelines for South African rural schools. This conceptual paper presents the theoretical building blocks for such a resilience framework.