Blogs

The German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has stated in a new strategy paper, that “Information and communications technology (ICT)” are “key technologies for sustainable development”.

In the paper (BMZ Strategy Paper 2 | 2013e), the ict@innovation programme is featured and serves as example to highlight the priority area of “IT sector development” and to stress the potential of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for sustainable development.

It was a great week for FOSSFA's ict@innovation marketing team in the first week of October 2012.

It is always interesting that every time I get involved in a discussion about FOSS and Proprietary software, the FOSS enthusiasts always take on an activist approach. This in my opinion becomes the biggest hurdle that faces FOSS entrepreneurs. When I train the FOSS business models course, I am always keen to remind the participants to focus on the business.

It was great ,unforgetable day in the history of Free and Open Source Software in Tanzania, as we celebrated Software freedom Day 2012. With  VIPs  around, Participants from the media, academics, business world, lawyers, software developoers, hackers present in the venue…! some from outside the
country , Germany, Canada, Finland, Kenya, what a re-union? i met my
former schoolmate who came all the way from Arusha, Mwanza, Zanzibar,
Iringa and Mbeya to participate in the event…! its a great day…!

From September 16th till September 21st the programme team will meet in Tanzania for a week of workshops.
We have a full week ahead: Monday: Pillar C - Evaluating the Internship Programme
Tuesday - Wednesday - Evaluation Workshop
Thursday - Volunteer Community Workshop
Friday - Steering Committee Meeting

In particular the evaluation and community workshop are of great importance as we will be looking back on four years of programme implementation and then will look ahead into the future.

Early this month, the Kenya open source
community held the Software Freedom Day (SFD) celebrations in Kenya
at the Strathmore University. This event was organized by the Linux
Professional Association of Kenya (LPA), in partnership with the iLab
and the Linux Professional Institute (LPI).
This was the second time that we were
hosting the SFD, after having done the first one in 2007.
The Software Freedom day is a concept
that was started by the Software Freedom Foundation and its aim is to

Nairobi had a series of SFD activities planned.

The first was student challenge which was organised on 31st August at Strathmore University. During this day a number of students made presentation on IT projects that they have developed or are currently working on that are based on FOSS.

A number of interesting projects were demonstrated.

The ongoing evaluation of ict@innovation is conducting an online survey of participants in regional training of trainer courses. Although only 20 out of 220 responded so far, the initial results promise to be interesting. More responses from participants will be needed to validate the initial results.

The first french FOSS Business models ToT kicked off today 3rd Sept. 2012 in Dakar Senegal. This training has been named ¨Entreprendre avec les Logiciels Libre en Afrique¨ (EllA).The training brings together enthusiastic participants comprising of professors and entrepreneurs from various francophone African countries. There are participants from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d´Ivoire, Mali,Niger,Senegal and Togo. This particular training has 7 women participants out of the total 26 who turned up on Day 1. The largest number in a ToT in the ict@innovation programme.