Press Releases 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 A New Era Marks Africa's Independence. Released on 30 Jun 2010 This year 2010 marks the 50th anniversary of 17 African states gaining independence. Now, a wave of homegrown programmers, developers and software makers claim to be heralding a new era of African independence and on July 4, 2010, the Free Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) organized the Idlelo Conference in Accra, Ghana to discuss new softwares opportunities in Africa. The conference was attended by the continent’s cleverest coding minds. Unlike the bigger, foreign developers - who have mainly targeted the urban markets - the coders at this event looked at how to reach the rural, relatively poorer communities of Africa. In their words, they're people who know how to code and know the continent. The meeting was hosted at the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT. Dorothy Gordon is the centre's Director General. In her speech, she said; ‘We have to remember that most of our people are not going to be able to read text messages, whether they're in English or in French or in any European languages. We have to develop and localise the applications so that they work in our own languages.  The whole point of this kind of meeting is to make it happen, and to make it happen faster. And it's not necessarily going to be a major vendor who's going to invest in that kind of research and get it to happen.’ Big multi-nationals are paying more attention to Africa than ever before. However, this attention has been directed at developing e-government systems. This, says Ms Gordon, raises new issues when it comes to Africa's independence.  She went on to say; ‘If you look at the national level, or even if you look at the whole continent, you'll see that many of the technologies we use are imported. That means that you are vulnerable. If all your systems are imported, it creates a new kind of dependency, because you're dependant on those companies to keep your country running.’ She believes open source software is the solution. She justified this view in her words; ‘It allows us to build capacity and competency faster. And that means that a young developer gets to the level where they can actually start up their own company much much faster; and that they have a whole network, globally, of people that can mentor them and get them so that they're really operating at a global standard.’ The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has its origin in the ICT Policy and Civil Society Workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia held between 6th and 8th November 2002. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, acting on the mandate given to it by the Bamako Bureau established by the African Council of ICT ministers in the continent's preparation towards the World Summit on the Information Society, saw for developing a framework for open source solutions emerged strongly. Consequently, the working group on Information Security, Applications Development (Open Source), unanimously resolved to create itself into an interim civil society task force on open source to be called the Open Source Task Force for Africa – OSTA. The overall goal of the taskforce was to bring together individuals and organizations working on open source in Africa and consequently seek mandate to establish the ' Free Software & Open Source Foundation for Africa' during the World Summit on the Information Society preparatory committee (WSIS PrepCom) meeting in February 2003 and in the same month, the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) was launched in Geneva, Switzerland during the second preparatory meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). FOSSFA’s vision is to promote the use of FOSS and the FOSS model in African development and so far, the organisation has recorded impressive gains in this regard. Back