4IR and South Africa’s readiness to embrace it

advent of 4IR.

• Just over half of the respondents were of the view that 4IR will result in large-scale job losses, with two in five believing it will lead to social unrest.

• Only a quarter of the respondents believe that the 4IR will improve societal equality.

• A third of the respondents believe that during the 4IR there will be an improvement to service delivery.

• More than half of the respondents believe that there will be an improvement in re-industrialisation from the 4IR. Government and private sector respondents were optimistic about 4IR.

It’s clear that 4IR is an unknown or at best a poorly understood concept by a substantial portion of South African citizens. This lack of knowledge, especially among entrepreneurs, is cause for concern.

Conclusion

There is a great deal to be done to prepare South Africa for 4IR. It will require a multi-disciplinary, multi-faceted, educational awareness and up-skilling approach from all stakeholders: government, private sector, educational institutions, developmental agencies, the media and ultimately the forward-thinking individual.

4IR is coming whether we are prepared for it or not. Are we, as a society going to ready ourselves and embrace it and let it lift us into a new collective and moral consciousness with a sense of shared destiny, or will we allow it to compromise our traditional sources of meaning — work, community, family, and identity? The choice is firmly in our collective hands.

About Kagiso

Kagiso Trust is one of South Africa’s leading development agencies, working towards a prosperous, peaceful, equitable and just society. We work to overcome poverty by developing and implementing scalable, replicable, sustainable development programme models in the areas of education development, institutional capacity building, socioeconomic development and financial sustainability.

In the past 30 years, we have invested over R2-billion in development and implemented 1 831 programmes.