The University of Jos, Jos announced to day that it will participate in a project to develop Free Software for use in higher education in Africa. The project, known as the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR), is a collaboration with the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, and is funded by a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. ?The IDRC grant enables the establishment of a network of African universities to build Free Software for use in Higher Education on the Continent.
The first output of the project will be a second-generation learning management system suitable for the bandwidth environment of Africa but that is at the cutting edge of e-learning. The group will also be developing applications for use in managing student enrollment as well as other aspects of university administration. An important part of the AVOIR project is also research into processes of collaboration and Free and Open Source Software development in the African context, as well a research into the design of e-learning systems. The Universities which are participating in the project are the University of Jos (Nigeria), Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Senegal), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Kenya), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Catholic University of Mozambique (Mozambique) and the University of Eduardo Modlane (Mozambique), and the University of the Western Cape (South Africa).
The project was started initially using a grant from USAID?s Leland Initiative through its Information Technology Public-Private Alliance (IT-PPA), and the Department of Science and Technology (South Africa) and UNESCO. ?This grant allows us to bring our African partners in to the AVOIR alliance at last,? says Prof Derek Keats, Executive Director of Information and Communication Services (ICS) at UWC.
"What we are interested in achieving is to build a cadre of developers around Africa who understand and follow a Free Software approach and philosophy and who develop software that is useful to people, especially in Education,"says Melisse Benn who is the software project manager on AVOIR.
According to Keats, "the IDRC grant is a step in establishing an alliance of partners engaged in the development of software, educational materials an in other collaborative initiatives all around Africa. ?This is an example of how people in their daily activities can support ? indeed become ? the African Rennaisance, and help to achieve the goals of NEPAD. We are very grateful to the IDRC for supporting this initiative? said Keats.
Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is one of the world's leading institutions in the generation and application of new knowledge to meet the challenges of international development. For more than 30 years, IDRC has worked in close collaboration with researchers from the developing world in their search for the means to build healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous societies.