Our History

The LINK Centre has its origins in the mid-1990s, at the beginnings of South Africa's democratic era, during a period that saw the establishment of many new education and training entities in the country.

The centre's activities launched in 1996 as the ICT4D programme of the Wits Graduate School of Public and Development Management (P&DM), the precursor to today's Wits School of Governance (WSG), and became the LINK Centre in 2000.

In 2011, the Centre moved over to the Wits Faculty of Humanities, so as to take advantage of that Faculty's research-rich environment, joining the School of Literature, Language and Media (SLLM). 

The LINK Centre is a also a founding member of, and based at, the Wits Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct. The Tshimologong Precinct is the brainchild of Wits Prof Barry Dwolatzky of the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE), with which LINK partners on research and delivery of professional Certificate courses.

LINK has also previously had intra-university partnerships with the Wits School of Electrical and Information Engineering (for research on spectrum engineering/regulation, and teaching on the telecommunications business environment), and with the Division of Information Systems in the Wits School of Economic and Business Sciences (SEBS) (for work on e-health services improvement).