There is always however the danger that regulatory intervention of this kind does not always have the intended consequences. According to Business Map, identifiable black empowerment deals in the information and telecommunications industries were around R4,5billion for the period 1996 to 1998. Empowerment through the ensuring of ownership and control by historically disadvantaged individuals, however, has come under serious scrutiny in the last few years with the information communications technology sector coming under particular focus. As ownership by historically disadvantaged individuals has becomes concentrated in the same hands, the notion of empowerment is being challenged. It has been argued that few have built businesses organically, few have built operational capacity in particular investments and few have built capacity in their investment vehicles. Many empowerment arrangements have been of questionable empowerment value and have been criticised for having a zero based effect on employment, skills and opportunities.

Experience to date is that aspirant historically disadvantaged licensees are predominantly male and the regulator will need to be vigilant in its evaluation of applications to ensure the inclusion of women and the disabled in shareholdings of licensees. A recent report on empowerment done for the South African Independent Broadcasting Authority on Black Economic Empowerment said that while most licensees claimed to be meeting gender representation requirements there were few women in senior editorial or executive management positions. And while women's investment groups were part of the bidding consortia for licences there were very few entities left that represent women shareholders specifically.

Regulators in the communications sector with specific mandates to encourage the participation of women in the sector will need to investigate specific strategies aimed at supporting women owners and managers. In addition affirmative procurement policies adopted by government, or required of parastatals and operators in the sector, have not gone very far to encourage the development of small, medium and micro enterprises, specifically those involving women.

What is captured in the licence is the central purpose of the strategic equity partner deal namely, that the network is doubled within five years and Telkom is prepared for competition. However the company is not permitted to double the network only where it is most profitable for it. The licence requires that Telkom provide services to priority customers such as schools, hospitals, libraries and local authorities. In addition they are required over the five years of their exclusivity to ensure that over 3000 villages without service are serviced. Failure to meet these targets will result in Telkom incurring substantial penalties but it has the incentive of a sixth year of exclusivity if it exceeds its targets.

In addition they have pay telephone obligations; free emergency services and special services to people with special needs, such as the blind or hard of hearing. Service targets were also set against a number of indicators including customer faults reported, percentage of fault cleared within 48 hours, serviceability of pay phones and customer waiting lists, all for both business and residential; directory obligations and at a reasonable charge, voice directories in the languages predominantly used in that region; publication of charges and procedures for customer complaints.

Perhaps one of the most important regulatory mechanisms under a monopoly situation is price regulation through the setting of tariffs. As I shall demonstrate, affordability is one of the major factors inhibiting the penetration of telephones in South Africa. It has been claimed that in some months, churn as a result of termination of service, is greater that the number of lines being rolled out. The realities of rebalancing of tariffs, however, means that while international call costs are plummeting local calls are being subsidised less and less by international calls and it is these hikes that hit the poorest hardest.

The cellular operators are also required to comply with a range of community service obligations; general consumer orientated provisions such as price regulation and codes of practice. However, the contribution made has been pitiful. Besides some of the applications of "community phones" being questionable, the obligation to roll out community telephones was linked to their projection of penetration, the long term projections of which were met in the first few years. In addition the mobile cellular operators have used the implementation of their community obligations primarily as an opportunity to profitably expand service, such as setting up phone shop franchises in areas which are not the most underserved.

The collection, processing and dissemination of statistics are in fact the only basis for validating strategies and the way to benchmark results. With sound statistics inaccurate generalisations can be avoided and incorrect assumptions challenged. Without regulatory obligations to furnish statistics there is in many cases, especially in many of our countries with a poor or non-existent history of census data, no primary source of data to gauge developments.

The introduction of such measures, particularly with regard to gender however, should not be seen purely as social reengineering solely on the basis of democratic commitment to equality. There is a strong industrial imperative, as we move towards information based economies, which constantly require more and more skilled people. There simply are not enough. A recent year long telecommunications sector needs analysis commissioned by the South African Government identified the need for over 6000 engineers, South Africa produces less than 500 a year. The point is that from an economic development perspective, countries cannot afford to ignore the human resource potential of over half of their population.

As the legislation currently stands these are licence requirements and contributions that would be over and above the financial levy the operator would be required to pay to the Human Resource Development Fund. This fund, intended only for the telecommunications sector, has now been overtaken by national skills development legislation. Every company is required to contribute a 1% levy on their total wage bill to their Sector and Education Training Broad.

The Employment Equity Act further requires that, on a national scale, companies move towards gender and racial equity in their employment practices. Both these pieces of legislation are widely viewed as testimony of the power of the unions and they have likewise been criticised for creating an unfriendly investor environment.

It is for this reason that I wish to explore the developmental possibilities that telecommunications can offer and which could positively affect the lives of the majority of people and, I argue further, to optimalise the use of limited resources should be specifically targeted at women.

Much of the thinking behind policy and implementation strategies for the telecommunications sector is based on the need for economic investment and growth. While this is clearly a necessary condition for development it is not a sufficient condition. There is a substantial body of international evidence to demonstrate that increased Gross National Product rates often do not equate with improved levels of poverty or reduced income distribution gaps.

In line with having among the most skewed income distribution in the world South Africa has one of the most skewed teledensities. While historically white South Africa has a teledensity of over 50%, the rural areas have teledensity of less than 1%. These rural areas, like most developing countries, are populated predominantly by women and children. Like many other countries, but compounded by apartheid legacies such as migrant labour, the vast number of these rural households are headed by women.

This is not to ignore the needs of urban women or the poor more generally. In South Africa around 37% of the population, around 17 million people, survive below the poverty line and of these about 11 million live in rural areas. (It should be noted that the datum lines used for such studies are relatively arbitrary and substantially more people are likely to be living in absolute poverty.) The point being made is that throughout the world but particularly in the Third World, the poor are disproportionately located in rural areas and more likely to be women and children.

Michael Todaro points out that more than 70% of the world's poorest people are women and that comparative studies indicate that across the Third World women and children experience the hardest deprivation. "Women and children are more likely to be poor and malnourished and less likely to receive medical services, clean water, sanitation or other benefits."

The lower earning capacity of women through lack of access to education, formal sector employment, social security and government employment programmes ensure the marginalised position of women throughout the Third World. The poorest segments of the Third World populations live in households headed by women who generally have less education, lower income and higher fertility than male headed households.

Rural women have less access to the resources necessary to generate stable incomes and very often are subject to laws and practices that compromise their earning potential. In addition household income on its own is an inadequate measure of individual welfare because distribution of resources within the household may be very uneven. "Existing studies of intra-household resource allocation clearly indicate that in many regions of the world, there exists a strong bias against females in areas such as nutrition, medical care, education and inheritance".

This bleak picture of lives of the majority of women in the Third World is echoed in the research the South African telecom regulator commissioned DRA Development consultants to do in order to determine the beneficiaries of the subsidies from the Universal Service Fund to needy people referred to in the Act.

• Female headed households are more likely to be in the rural areas where poverty is concentrated;
• Female-headed households tend to have fewer adults of working age;
• Female unemployment rates are higher , and;
• The wage gap between male and female earnings persists.

Few of the marginalised women referred to by these statistics will have the resources to take up the services promised by the target in the Telkom PSTS licence to double the network within their period of exclusivity and that 1,6 million of these new lines be placed in under-serviced areas. It is for this reason that the question of accessibility has to be accompanied by that of affordability.

International studies suggest that basic telephony should cost a household not more than 0.7% of its total income. The most recent figures available for South Africa suggest that the total spent by all households on telephony is 2.87% of monthly income. (This is made up of an expenditure of 0.65% on rentals and installation and 2.22% on calls). It is unlikely in the SA situation that we will manage to realise telecommunications expenditure at less than 1% of the total household income. Realistically, telecommunications expected expenditure, as a percentage of household income, needs to be anticipated between two and three percent.

Results of numerous studies undertaken by DRA Development show that after a lead-in time of seven months, households spend an average of between R21 and R30 per month on telecommunications. Given the commitment to tariff rebalancing and an anticipated increase of 25%, it could be said that the minimum a household needs to spend on telephony each month would be around R30.

Using 2% of household income allocated to telephony and an expenditure of R30 as a benchmark, then 44% (3.8 million) of all households could be said to be unable to afford to utilise a telephone. This percentage rises to 69% or just over 6 million households if monthly expenditure is set at R70. This means that 60% of all households would not even be able to afford to rent a telephone at R49.59 p.m. Thus, on current available data, only 3.7million households (42%) can afford to install and maintain a telephone without any assistance.

In South Africa too, statistics to highlight the disparities in access to the public telecommunication network are constantly on the lips of politicians, regulators and operators - and the associated question of affordability of basic and advanced telecommunication services is a priority on the national agenda. The focus however, is usually on the significant levels of poverty in the country, or the high infrastructural costs of rolling out services, or the economic and political problems associated with rebalancing tariffs. Seldom does this debate reveal the fundamental determinants of uneven network development that exist throughout the world and which are not particular to South Africa's unique past.

The issue of tariff rebalancing - the bringing in line of charges and costs - for example, is usually presented solely as a neutral and sound accounting principle residing in the unquestionable givens of "best practice". Little is said however of how these costs are derived, why they are as high as they are, who these infrastructural investments will most benefit or who are most likely proportionally to carry the burden of payment.

As Mansell argues, in most cases the public interest priority of public network design that meets the needs of all potential customers and offers a common public infrastructure that incorporates a set of minimum technical conditions, is assumed to inform the decisions on network design and technological deployment. "Political, economic, social and cultural factors are embedded in the design and implementation of intelligent networks and the story of how this occurs is necessary to complement studies of corporate strategy, policy and regulatory reform that treat the telecom network as a technical black box."

The approach to technological innovation arising from this seemingly neutral technical understanding with respect to the design of the public network assumes that its diffusion results in flourishing competition and a declining need for regulation. However, Mansell identifies another view of this process which sees technical innovation as transforming "the monopolistic supply arrangements of the past to oligopolitistic markets in which global rivalries increasingly set the priorities for public network development. The result is a continuing need for regulation to safeguard the public interest in access to the public telecommunication network."

She argues that the design and availability of the public telecommunication network, as an important medium for communication, shape the conduct of social and economic life. Although the direct relationships between investment in networks and social and economic development are difficult to determine, there is enough evidence to suggest that political and economic control in society is contingent upon the characteristics of the electronic communication environment. She argues that communication networks are being designed in order to meet certain competitive priorities of a relatively small number of elite, oligopolistic firms rather than the public policy priorities of public networks.

She contends that although the evolution of telecommunications networks are argued to be the product of technical limitation or innovation, technical developments are also the product of the political and economic factors that informs them. The terms and condition of public network access are influenced by technical standards, restriction on the use of networks and prices of services. These aspects are shaped by the political and economic priorities of a variety of public and private institutions. She regards the technical aspects of network evolution as not holding solutions to the disparities in the accessibility of communication services.

As Mona Dahms and others have pointed out it is assumed that the deployment of telecommunication infrastructure is beneficial to everybody within a local community equally, independent of gender, class, age or ethnicity. Research indicates that women may be restricted from having access to telephones even when they are available in their communities as a result of social, economic, cultural or technological constraints. "The main point to underline here is that gender awareness is a prerequisite when planning and implementing telecommunication systems that will be beneficially to all users."

"If policy and regulation are to encourage more equitable access to electronic means of communication," as Mansell argues, "the social and economic issues raised by the technical design and implementation of the intelligent network must be addressed by a community far wider than network engineers." Specifically as regards women and maringalised women in particular, the only way their needs as consumers and producers are likely to be incorporate in the research and development, planning and implementation of telecommunications is through the inclusion and participation of women in every levels and facet of the sector. This is clearly a long- term strategy requiring fundamental shifts in social-cultural behaviour and economic and political practices which will need to be whittled away through the participation of women, or pressure for their participation, in policy formulation, legislation, regulation and operation.

Through such processes present policies and regulatory institutions may be compelled to ensure that the concept of the public interest informs the design and implementation of the expansion of the public network especially as it seeks to compete with new intelligent networks. Regulatory tools such as pricing and access may need to challenge some of the fundamental assumptions which have informed these practices rather than proceeding on the basis that the technical decisions are neutral and the cost merely reflect these. Rather than presuming that public interest decisions inform the evolution of the public network, regulators should critically engage with operators, suppliers, users and potential customers before sanctioning pricing or access practices.

However, with a R 20million ceiling placed on the USF by ministerial directive, as part of the negotiations for the strategic equity partial privatisation of the telco, Telkom, the real developmental potential of providing subsidised universal service is severely undermined.

The potential impact of telephone access to women in rural areas is significant. In addition to the direct benefits of homes being connected to health and emergency services there is sufficient evidence to support the belief that together with other social and economic projects (e.g. access to micro-capital, training projects etc) telecommunication access can facilitate localised economic growth. It could allow people to gain information on market prices, order goods and services etc. If this increased potential for increased economic opportunity can be harnessed in targeted small and micro enterprise initiatives, the lives of women could be positively effected.

This is not to suggest that telephone access and indeed information and communication technologies arising from this, are instant panaceas for poverty alleviation for women or anyone else. Richard Heeks has made the point that information communication technologies may have a greater role to play in making the poor information providers more than information recipients. Focusing specifically on small and micro enterprises he argues that these may have a direct and growing relationship to poverty alleviation.

He identifies a few potential roles for ICTs and concludes that it is in fulfilling the needs for receipt and provision of information that ICTs can most effectively meet the needs of low income countries and small /micro-enterprises. As output and production technology he argues that either as hardware or software production ICTs are increasingly vital to low-income countries however within that context they have largely been the preserve of large, highly-skilled, capital-intensive firms, not directly concerned with poverty alleviation. As an information processing technology, ICTs are relatively expensive and labour unintensive from a macro point of view and for small/micro enterprises tend to exceed their information processing needs and budgets. He argues that it is the role as an information communication technology that ICTs are best able to fulfill the needs of small enterprises for cost-effectively fulfilling receipt and provision of information needs.

However, for this to be effective, other "environmental components" such as money, skills, technical infrastructure, and motivation and knowledge must be present. By and large the poor simply are not endowed with these resources. He argues therefore that while information is a necessary resource for poverty alleviation it is by no means a sufficient one. "Equally - indeed more - important are factors such as financial credit, skills, production technology, demand for outputs, plus other social resources. All of these have to borne in mind when assessing the relative priority to give to ICTS in the development process."

Heeks concludes that while information deficits are an issue for poor entrepreneurs a prerequisite for making use of information are resources like skills, knowledge and money. Uncontextualised or localised ICT-based information systems will not meet their information needs. These will only be effective when they complement organic information systems. Intermediaries such as NGOs and government agencies are likely to be needed to bridge the resource and capacity gaps between what the poor have and what they would need to use ICTs. While these intermediaries are a necessary interim mechanism, the poor ultimately will only reap the fullest benefits when they own and control both the technology and its related know-how.

While a litany of failures to successfully implement basic and advanced services in the interests of sustainable development can be identified, there are some projects which have targeted women and sought to provide some of the necessary resources identified by Heeks. One of the simplest success stories is the now well-known example of the micro-lending Grameen Bank in Bangladesh which targeted the financing of cellular telephone for women to begin micro-enterprises selling access and time on cellular phones to villagers. In addition to providing convenient access to communication services the women were by and large able to draw sufficient income to live above the poverty line, under which a large proportion of the population in Bangladesh live. An indication of the sustainability of the project is that the number of defaulters on interest payments is minimal.

Another example of ensuring that women participate in state or NGO initiatives is that of the initial telecentre managers programme offered by the Universal Service Agency in South Africa. Half of the nominees for the first telecentres from the identified communities were required to be women, who successfully completed the course out of proportion to their numbers. Although the need for resources to operate these centres was acknowledged and support provided, the actually implementation with regard to the effective contextualisation of centres and their sustainability has been problematic, however these have not related to the conscious decision to ensure the participation of women.

Any development programmes that fail to improve the conditions of existence for the most marginalised will fail. In the longer term any economic growth which does not actively include women will come up against deficiencies in the quality of its human capital. Educational achievement and future economic status of children are much more likely to reflect those of the mother than those of the father.

Social investments are more likely to be passed onto future generations if women are actively integrated into developmental programmes. As human capital is the central requirement for growth it would appear that women too are central to meeting development objectives such as universal access and service.

• At the institutional level the regulator can provide an example of a gender mainstreaming that meets the diverse needs of all citizens.
• At the sectoral level the regulator can require annual reporting on progress made towards the achievement of national targets such as employment, promotion training etc.
• The regulator can develop databases in order to develop more sound strategies in relation to the advancement of historically marginalised groups in the sector.
• The regulator can encourage the analysis of the communication needs of women and encourage research and development to meet them.
• The regulator must more critically and dynamically use the regulatory tools of standard setting and pricing and accessing policies. Minimum technical and administrative conditions of network supply should be adopted together with detailed accounting procedures to ensure open networks that are able to affordably meet the needs of all potential customers.
• The regulator together with other agencies can implement strategies that target marginalised groups such as rural women or female-headed households and track the social and economic impact of such strategies through pilot or focused community projects.
• The regulator can prioritise the allocation of telecommunications resources ensure that the total package of resources and capacity necessary to successfully utilise basic and advanced communication services for social and economic development are made accessible to educational, health, and small business development initiatives targeted at women and other marginalised groups.