The SKA and Human Development
Abstract
The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is South Africa???s flagship science project and is becoming emblematic of science and technology achievement in South Africa. One of the key benefits of the SKA could be the transformation of South Africa in the eyes of the global community ???from a country in Africa to a country that can compete in the global knowledge economy and which can develop its own technology.
The research proposed here aims to make critical intelligence about the human development impact of the SKA available to management, policy makers, and other interested stakeholders. The socio-economic impact of the SKA, on the one hand, and the socio-cultural impact of the SKA, on the other, form the axis around which the proposed research activities will be structured. Since the nature of the SKA???s human development impact is as yet not clearly defined, the research trajectory would at first be exploratory in nature, setting out to use an array of lenses from the social sciences and the humanities to scope the broader economic and social contexts and impacts. On the basis of these efforts, selected avenues of enquiry would be scaled up to provide more comprehensive research on significant areas of impact.
