HERMANUS, Western Cape – In a robust endorsement of its sustained impact, Raymond Crown, ICT Director at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), positioned the Southern Africa Telecommunications Networks and Applications Conference (SATNAC) as the critical engine ensuring the region transitions from a consumer to a contributor of global technological innovation.
Speaking at the 2025 conference, Crown emphasised that SATNAC’s 27-year legacy provides the essential “discipline of continuity” needed to build South Africa’s digital future on a foundation of tangible research and proven partnerships, not abstract ideas.
“SATNAC remains one of the few forums that consistently brings research, industry, and policy into the same room with a shared purpose, to strengthen South Africa’s digital capability,” Crown stated.
“This is what makes this conference special, and that is why it has endured.”
He contrasted the forum with superficial gatherings, asserting, “This is not a conference of slogans and photo opportunities. SATNAC is a technical, research-driven forum.”
He pointed to its anchoring in the Telkom-Centres of Excellence (CoE) programme as proof of its material impact, citing that since 1997, the programme has supported over 3,600 postgraduates and produced more than 7,300 research outputs.
Critically, Crown highlighted that this research directly fuels the sector.
“More than 3,200 alumni from the program have been integrated into the ICT sector… These numbers tell a story of scale, impact, and intentional transformation,” he said, presenting it as evidence that long-term investment in people and ideas directly grows national digital capacity.
Looking forward, Crown highlighed the new NRF Future Technologies Programme, a R18 million, three-year pilot co-funded by Telkom and the National Research Foundation, as a strategic blueprint to scale this success.
The programme targets national priorities like AI, 5G, and African language NLP, while deliberately prioritising historically disadvantaged institutions to distribute research capability more equitably.
“In other words, Future Tech is focused on the technologies that will define whether South Africa is simply a consumer of global innovation or a contributor to it,” Crown explained.
He concluded by talking about SATNAC’s core mission as a vital mechanism for national alignment.
“SATNAC exists to help ensure that South Africa and the broader region is firmly on the side of contributing to innovation,” he said, defining it as the essential forum that closes the loop between policy, research, and industry practice to avoid both “misalignment and irrelevance.”
Crown’s address reinforced SATNAC 2025’s theme of “Africa’s Ascent,” underlining that the continent’s digital advancement hinges on such sustained, disciplined collaboration to build sovereign skills and homegrown solutions.
