Not long ago, Frank Tilugulilwa tweeted a link to an article about the efforts of Tanzania`s government to soon provide the citizens of Tanzania with „fast, efficient and affordable data traffic to support a range of industries.“ No wonder that this information matters to Frank Tilugulilwa. He is the head of the Free Software Innovation Unit at University of Dar es Salaam Computing Center Ltd, and one of the trainers of GIZs and FOSSFAs pan-african FOSS Business Trainings.

Dear All,

I am currently working on the newsletter  of FOSSFA and it will be a special one since Idlelo was the main event of March.

So feel free to send me your inputs (thoughts, pictures, etc.) or quotes that you will like to share (you can let me know if you want to write about something special).

Have an excellent week.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bonjour à tous,

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.

The Idlelo 5 conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons took place from March 19th – March 23rd, 2012 in Abuja, Nigeria. The IDLELO Conference, themed “Open Source Solutions for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)”, is a premier international forum on Free and Open Source Software in Africa and is therefore an especially important event for any ICT programme.

Have you participated in training-of-trainer courses of ict@innovation or in one of its network-ing events? Are you a partner or friend of the FOSSFA/GIZ programme "ict@innovation"? Then you are cordially invited to join the new group "Alumni of ict@innovation " on the Alumniportal Germany. This will enable you to:

... link up with all fellow trainers, participants, partners & friends of ict@innovation
... stay in touch with GIZ through regular news for alumni and a “Topic of the month”

The ict@innovation programme would like to inform all ict@innovation trainers that we have opportunities for support to attend the Idlelo5 Conference in Abuja which will be taking place between 19^th and 23^rd March 2012.

Dear all,

The Tampere University of Technology in Finland is running an Open Source Software Community game that allows you to gain open source skills! The game is starting today and for those of you interested in participating at it please just see the original announcement from Vreerendra who is part of the group that is running the game:

http://www.opense.net/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=291&func=view&catid=612&id=463

A group of geek-interns were out in full force in Tanzania recently, taking part in rigorous FOSS development training, which included topics such as optimisation techniques and infrastructure deployment and maintenance.

The workshop, which is part of the greater Mentored Internship Project also known as the MIP (of which you can find out more information on page 7 of this Chisimba newsletter), was hosted at the University of Dar es Salaam in February this year.

23rd August 2011, Kimberely,SOUTH AFRICA