South Africa

Summary
South Africa has maintained a relatively high but stable degree of digital dependence. The DDI value remained close to 0.78. Dependence on ICT patents stayed complete between 2010 and 2023 (1.0), while platform dependence remained consistently high, fluctuating between 0.91 and 0.98. Dependence on trade in ICT goods remained elevated, ranging between 0.86 and 0.89, with only minor changes over time. In contrast, dependence on trade in ICT services fluctuated considerably, peaking above 0.50 during the mid-2010s before declining to approximately 0.43 in 2023.

Policies
While our research did not bring up a large variety of digital dependence-related measures between 2020 and 2026, South Africa did launch one highly relevant policy in 2024: The “National Policy on Data and Cloud“ aims to enforce national data sovereignty by mandating domestic storage for critical information. Another stated goal is the creation of a centralized sovereign cloud.