Grandiose schemes have seen billions of Rands being poured into projects that seem to result in impressive offices and elaborate Websites and glossy annual reports – and little else.

Technology development must not be funded for its own sake. No one particularly cares that you can put a trillion bits down a piece of fibre. They do care that their company can synchronise warehouse inventory and shelf stock information. No one cares that a multimegabit microwave link can extend twenty kilometres. They do care that their head office can be connected to the Internet in less than a day.

The main flaw in the current funding model by government is that it is completely focussed on the ‘supply side’. If you build it they will come. But what to build? Where? How? Why? And more importantly, once built, how is the system sold so that it’s both cost effective and self-sustaining?

How about asking the people that know? The end users of the technology.  The customers who are actually smarter than often given credit for.  Instead of funding the creators of the technology, fund the buyers of it – because they will find the best provider that does what they want, at a price that is reasonable, and they will pay only when they get it.

If government disburses the money currently being poured into the supply-side (i.e. state owned telecoms enterprises and other development mega-projects), and instead redirected this spending into a ‘national broadband voucher system’ redeemable at any licensed telecoms supplier, it would subsidise the tech buying of viable companies looking to grow – especially those with eyes on national and even international markets.

Medium-sized South African enterprises can get the tech they need to be more competitive, and the tech suppliers get a huge bump in revenues, which allows them to grow and invest in R&D, in training, in giving more people more jobs, in keeping much-needed skills in the country.

Contrary to the current emphasis by Big Government and Big Business, jobs and economic growth are strongly tied to the small and mid-size business. According to the DTI’s (quite elderly) figures, South African small and mid-size enterprises (10-50 and 51-200 staff respectively) contributed 56% of private sector employment and 36% of the gross domestic product in 2002.

Many mid-size companies in SA are doing OK – but could be doing a lot better, and lack of access to technology and telecoms is a major challenge. At the same time, local tech companies are ready and willing to service them, but need paying customers to be able to invest in development and in building economies of scale to reduce costs.

Some examples of top-end technology that’s come out of the SMB tech space? IP Voice and hosted PABX. Much of the original R&D was from the open source community, with small tech businesses that after many years of struggle managed to boot-strapped themselves from two-man start-up to substantial operations. Point-to-point WiFi uses of off-the-shelf networking hardware to create long-distance wireless links. Perhaps a little grey legally at the start, but it was a cheap, elegant and very effective tech that solved midsize businesses’ connectivity problem when the lumbering telco giants simply had nothing to offer. Now it’s a large industry that needs to reinvest in more sustainable, robust systems like microwave or even fibre.

A system of providing SMBs with funds to buy what they need most would (almost by definition) be vastly more efficient than the current supply-side model, because the companies getting the money would want to see it being spent as wisely as possible. The companies providing the services or products would have to be efficient, because they are competing against their peers in an open market.

The vast and manifestly unproductive bureaucracies currently spending vast taxpayer-funded budgets on feasibility studies and needs analyses and inter-disciplinary taskforces could instead turn their hands to the vastly easier and more manageable job of validating supplier companies as legitimate businesses and allocating the “tech vouchers” to small and medium businesses.

Everyone wins. We stimulate a more competitive, and viable, technology provider market that has revenue to grow. We give small and medium business the technology they need to be successful. We stop wasting taxpayer money.

All it will take is for policymakers to let go of trying to control technology development in South Africa, and trust that the buyers of it know what they want and what is important, and then let the market sort out the winners and losers.