Independence 2.0

It’s been 50 years since up to 17 African countries have gained independence, but the chasmistic digital divide between the West and the rest has left many African states reliant on foreign aid and technologies to help them become even feeble competitors . Finland for example, has recently passed a law giving every citizen the legal right to 1 Mbps broadband internet access.

It’s not however all doom and gloom , now, a wave of homegrown programmers, developers and software makers claim to be heralding a new era of African independence. Something that should really be of no surprise to anyone, in fact, in a continent were the world’s highest mobile growth rate is taking place, most people would say that it is about damn time that somebody, (an African please) did something.

The Idlelo conference, organised by the Free Software and Open source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), brought together the continent’s cleverest coding minds at Accra, in Ghana, to discuss new software opportunities for Africa. Unlike the bigger foreign developers who mainly target the urban markets, the organisers of the event looked at how to reach the rural, relatively poorer communities of Africa. What makes projects such as this very important is that the future of social networking and even citizen journalism are dependent on their success .

Social networking is no longer a first world country entitlement as it has proven to be of immense help to human beings and countries in times of crisis. The efforts of Africa’s open source community are already creating an impact. Following the Haiti earthquake, those affected could use geotagging software to shout out for supplies and the pleas would appear on the website www.ushahidi.com . The software behind the project was produced by developers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, and Botswana among other countries.

According to Dorothy Gordon, Director General kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT, big multi-nationals are paying more attention to Africa than ever before. However, this attention has been directed at developing e-government systems. “If you look as the national level, or even if you look at the whole continent, you will see that many of the technologies we use are imported” she commented. This of course means that African Nations and their governments are quite vulnerable, since all the systems in use are imported, this creates a dodgy dependency on those countries for technological maintenance and advancements.

The programme One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and the East African Community (EAC) aims to deliver 30 million laptops in the region by 2015. The two groups aim to find donors to help pay for the machines, which currently sell for more than $200, despite intentions to sell them for less. At the end of the day it’s all about money, ideally we would love to live in a world where governments can equip every kid to be educated and computer literate but that’s not the case. Governments have their agendas and the improvements in telecommunications and social networking are not always the number one priority. It is therefore up to Africans to initiate movements to take care of our problems cause frankly, no one else will.