Rationale and justification: Key thrusts

• i. Science and technology for rural development is a resource for expanding the freedoms and human rights that people in rural areas, most of them poor, are entitled to enjoy. The proposal focuses on science and technology as a decisive expansion of access to technologically exploitable knowledge, as the primary means of development and, to that extent, is essential for freedom and justice. Therefore, in a real sense, access to science and technology has a constitutive and instrumental role. The constitutive role of science and technology relates to the importance of substantive freedoms and human rights, which include basic capabilities such as being able to avoid deprivations (hunger, food insecurity and premature mortality), as well as the freedoms and human rights associated with information literacy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), and enjoying inclusive decision making. Access to science and technology, in this view, is part of the process of expanding freedoms and rights, and the assessment of rural development has to be informed by this consideration. On its own, political participation, such as voting and “free speech”, is defectively formulated, since in the 4IR context it misses the crucial insight that political participation and free speech are constitutive parts of development, freedom and human rights. Access to science and technology, when judged by the enhancement of freedom and justice, has to include the removal of information illiteracy.

• ii. Science and technology directly enhance the capabilities of people. This interlinkage is particularly important to grasp in considering rural development policy. The fact that, in the 4IR context, science and technology directly enhance people's capabilities, and so function as great engines of economic growth and redress, has to be integrated into rural development strategies. Examples of enhancing economic growth through science and technology opportunity are, of course, Japan and China, whose economic development was greatly helped by science-and-technology-based human resource development programmes.

• iii. The central roles of science and technology in advancing freedom and human rights make it particularly important to examine their determinants. While South African efforts have not made much progress, China is a great leap ahead of South Africa in being able to use science and technology for rural development.