balthas's blog

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.

On Thursday, 21. June, some open source initiatives will host an event in Berlin that aims to talk about "South Sudan and Open Source Culture" ... This might be of interest to some members of the ict@innovation community: You may then check the website, which also says, that the event will be livestreamed. Some more infos on the event coming from the organizers below:

"Challenging and Identifying Open Source Approaches

The German Government via its Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) released a call to fund research partnerships between German Research institutions and partners in Subsaharan Africa. One of the main goals is to build  African ICT study courses and to fund exploratory measures / pilot measures in  "Applied information and communication technologies (ICT)"  via German-African research partnerships.

“How do I know that this IT company from Kampala will be able to maintain my IT server infrastructure?” asks a contract-giving government agency in Uganda.  The answer lies in a trust-building certification, a crucial ingredient of any economic development agenda. Therefore, FOSSFA (Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa) and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Germany are proud to present the brand new “ict@innovation Training Guide on Linux System Administration - LPI Level 1”. 

I recently got good news from Mozambique, where Celso Timana from CENFOSS is building up Linux capacity from the ground. In cooperation with the German NGO “Linux4Africa”, he just opened a classroom with 23 Computers running Edubuntu and a X2GO Server at Maputos Malhazine Secondary School in Maputo.

More networking of African IT specialists with Europe and joint building of advanced training materials – this is what a new partnership of FOSSFA's and GIZ’s ict@innovation programme with the Europe-wide ‘Free Technology Academy’ (FTA) is all about. The Free Technology Academy (FTA), financially supported by the Life Long Learning programme (LLP) of the European Commission, is a collaboration between the Netherlands-based Free Knowledge Institute and three European universities.

We started this year with a new name: Since January 2011 ‘InWEnt - Capacity Building International, Germany’, the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH’ and ‘Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst gGmbH (DED)’ have pooled their long-standing expertise in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development and are now operating under the name 'Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH'. For more information on GIZ, see the partnership page.

Last week, the German "ICT for Development" community met in Berlin for a two day gathering on the topic of "ICT and rural economic development" organized by GTZ on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). I had the pleasure to be a moderator of a working group, which deliberated on "innovative business models". Of course I could not resist to talk about our ict@innovation product "Free your IT-Business in Africa!”.