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I've heard people say Cape Town is among the most beautiful cities on the planet. Those folks are right. Flying in from Joburg we circled out over the South Atlantic Ocean and alongside the distinctive Table Mountain before landing, which gave me a gorgeous view of the city. Like in Accra, there are cranes all over the place, as the country gears up for the 2010 World Cup. The parts of Cape Town I saw seem much more affluent than anywhere else I stopped on the trip. There are, however, obvious signs of drastic inequality everywhere you look. Particularly disturbing is the fact that in South Africa, far more so than in other places I visited, inequality is so clearly connected to race. The country still seems a long way from healing the wounds of apartheid. Such characteristics of the country actually make South Africa an important place in which to study issues of access to learning materials.
South Africa is sometimes said to be the "S" in the BRICS countries, an emerging economy approaching the same significance as Brazil, Russia, India and China. When viewed in light of South Africa's economic and political importance to the region, the comparison seems accurate. That means there are some fairly significant policy struggles to be resolved, including struggles over copyright policy.
My first day of meetings in Cape Town took place on the campus of the University of Cape Town, which is very nice compared to any other I saw in Africa. There is a mixture of old and new buildings perched on the slopes of the mountain, with well manicured paths and gardens connecting different parts of the campus. The law school is spacious and fairly modern. They don't seem to be facing the infrastructure issues that arise in other places. For methodological purposes, that makes it a bit easier to isolate copyright as a variable affecting access to learning materials.
Rather than us visiting librarians, learners or policymakers in South Africa on this trip, we received detailed accounts of the local research team's activities. As expected, the South African context is quite different than the rest of the continent. Because there is a copyright law reform process currently underway in South Africa, this is an ideal time for our researchers to be working on the project. They're interviewing a wide range of stakeholders to build up a body of empirical evidence that can be used to inform policymakers and, eventually, improve access to knowledge.
The next day's meetings took place at the offices of the Shuttleworth Foundation, which is co-funding the project along with the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa. It was good to connect with some of the key people supporting the project. Most of this day's work was debriefing the trip to the other members of the ACA2K team who will be conducting a comparative analysis of the results from each country as more data becomes available over the coming months.
So that's the next step. We'll be receiving formal reports from each country on both the legal and practical contexts in which copyright and education collide by the end of the year. We'll have a mid-project workshop in January to collectively present, discuss and dissect these results. Once we've done a thorough comparative analysis next year, the project will shift into a dissemination phase. Of course, all of this information will be available on www.aca2k.org as the project progresses. Check there often for updates.
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