Group 2

From HarambeeWiki

WOUGNET was formed in Uganda, in 2000. Women organisations located in the urban areas and then spread out to the rural areas formed it. It was started as a mailing list and has a rich website The location of their offices is in Kampala with another office in KIC. Their membership comprises of existing women organisations and have members from these organisations as their contact persons in the regions where their organisations operate. WOUGNET was founded by 5 women who were knowledgeable in ICT and has grown to consist of 82 women organisations. WOUGNET was began due to the information gap and technical support gap that existed. To address this issue they found a way to share information and particularly a way for women to acquire ICT’s and the knowledge on how to use them. As the network grew, there was a need to extend the network further to the rural areas and therefore prompted them to set up an office in the rural areas (KIC). Diversification from an Internet based organisation, and developing physical meetings, print material and CD-ROM that can reach the people not in the urban areas. For more information visit their website [1]

LinuxChix Africa was formed in December 2004 as an online discussion group to work on increasing the expertise of the African woman with regards to FOSS and ICT’s as a way of empowering women. Current location of their offices is in cyberspace as it is an online discussion group and is in the process of getting national chapters. Currently consists of 60 members across Africa. Formed by 2 computer scientists, Anna Badimo from South Africa and Dorcas Muthoni of Kenya. Being both from the education circles realised the need to have more women developers and to offer support for FOSS and thus increase the use of it. The need to increase the capacity of women to work with FOSS and in particular Linux with the aim of providing more affordable ICT’s led to its formation. In addition, LinuxChix Africa offers technical support the FOSS community in Africa. By reaching out to the communities LinuxChix Africa seeks to bridge the information gap. Software Freedom Day 2005 has brought individuals in different countries to meet face–to-face and set up events to mark the Software Freedom Day. As a result of these meetings and celebrations in various countries we are working on implementing local chapters to enhance the reach of our organisation and to set up more events to reach our goals. For more information visit their website [2]

Academia Research Network was formed as part of the Academy of African languages which was born in 2000. Academia research networks draws from this network and consists of intellectuals who are versed in the literacy and teaching of African languages Its located in Mali and headed by Mr. Samaseku and currently consists of 3 main headquarters Yaounde, South Africa and Mali Formed by a number of intellectuals in that particular field to run continental programs like a common Masters or Phd program, translation of stories etc. Need to have African languages to have a qualifying status – to be used as tools for wider communication. They are working on a number of projects for example with having a common Masters and Phd programs for which 5 universities have already been pin-pointed.

For the second part of the session the following questions were tackled:

1. What are the commonalities between your networks?

• To fill the information gap and address the information dissemination problem
• Trying to address a technology gap
• Trying to reach out to as many as possible (wide coverage) in a tangible way

2. What are some of the challenges you face as a network coordinator?

• Expectations of people are too high given the limited resources and satisfying the needs is difficult as they may be many; this limits the actual amount of people you can reach
• Connectivity: how to reach the people in terms of internet, community radios, computers, infrastructure etc

3. What is the most exciting thing about being a network coordinator?

• Being in a position to serve others and being in a position of motivating others to provide answers
• Providing support to enable them to others to improve themselves