yesebill's blog

On 23 October 2009, I visited a Business incubation programme located at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique. This was during my visit to Maputo for the Inwent sponsored ToT on African FOSS Business Model. The visit, curtsey of the University, was to show the ToT team what the university was doing to support FOSS related innovative business.

About three years ago, my house codeless phone got blown off by a bolt of lightening. The following six months I moved from company to company, and consulted several experts in an attempt to have it fixed but all efforts proved futile. One company I visited a well recognized telecom company (I will not mention the name) has a subsidiary company renowned for its technical capacity and expertise to fix all manner of telecom equipment.

“How do your organize a workshop whose objective is to collect what those participating ‘know’ about a particular subject?” A colleague of mine once asked me during a workshop planning session. “The same way we organize all other workshops” I must have answered without much thought. It was soon after a five day workshop entitled ‘harvesting knowledge and experiences in content generation and adaptation’ that we realized how important the question was. That was almost threes ago.

A friend of mine, a web developer, doing business with government once told me ‘business is slow but I can not complain.’ incongruous as it may sound, it is a very typical response among business people around here. ‘Sometime I only have one job in three months but when I do, I am paid in advance and a lot more than what others pay me’ he added. Well, wow! This is the market. But does Government really pay that well?