ICT: performance evaluation of community development worker’s in South Africa on e-skills^*

* Sajda Quereshi is the accepting Editor-in-Chief for this article.

ABSTRACT

Community development service practitioners have been increasingly burdened with a broader range of responsibilities and ICT could enhance their productivity. Therefore, it is prudent to incorporate information communication technology (ICT) skills into the skills matrix required by the practitioners in order to deliver the service effectively. Furthermore, ICT use is prevalent in almost every organization, therefore, ICT can also serve as a major factor in flexibility of delivery of community development service to the communities, but only if the practitioners possess adequate skills in using ICT tools (software applications) in retrieving, presenting and disseminating valuable and adequate information within the workplace to the parties involved. The study determines the current work conditions, level of performance and expertise in the use of ICT among community development workers (CDWs) in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, by evaluating their abilities and experiences, with a view to identify the areas to enhance their effectiveness. Determining the competency of their use of ICT applications is not an easy task; thus a survey methodology was adopted, with a sample of 189 CDWs (63% female and 37% male). Respondents were given the opportunity to rate of their own current ability to use common computer software applications.

KEYWORDS:

• Community development workers
• ICT competence
• evaluation methods
• CTT
• IRT

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Mr. R. O. Fasasi received the Masters in information and communication technology (ICT) from Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa. He has worked for more than a decade with a computer installation and networking firm and an additional four years with Image Production firm (Networking Department) in Nigeria. He is a certified Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). He is lecturing information technology management at the Management College of Southern Africa and currently studying towards a Ph.D. degree. His research interests are Enterprise Architecture, Software engineering, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), E-learning, IT for Community development among others.

Dr D. Heukelman is currently attached to the Durban University of Technology, South Africa, as Faculty of Accounting and Informatics research coordinator. She is actively engaged in research in the fields of Human Computer Interaction and has published a number of papers relating to HCI and training in ICT. She is the Technical Chair for an international conference, www.ictas2017.com, to be held in March 2017. Dr Heukelman has reviewed papers for The African Journal of Information Systems (AJIS) and for the Third International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication and Engineering.

She has been in Higher Education for 25 years and is passionate about making ICT accessible to all people everywhere. The pervasive use of mobile technology has opened a new world for people who would never own a computer, but who could benefit enormously from connectivity. The greater accessibility to e-learning is opening doors to many more students, but promoting access to these opportunities is the responsibility of ICT practitioners. Interventions to promote ICT globally should however be based on sound research to make a distinction.

She supervises post-graduate students and currently has eight masters and two doctoral students.

Notes

* Sajda Quereshi is the accepting Editor-in-Chief for this article.