The Open Society Institute today launched a fellowship program to enable outstanding individuals from around the world to pursue projects that will inspire meaningful debate and shape public policy.

The Open Society Fellowship will award $2 million in 2008 to scholars, journalists, activists and others working on national security; citizenship, membership and marginalization; authoritarianism; and new strategies and tools for advocacy.

Apologies for missing the last couple of weeks due to a fractured left arm which gradually on the mend.   Since the last roundup  on April 10th we have had 14 new members which is great. Kabissa has now passed the 1200 mark and still growing. I am  also pleased to see the steady growth in numbers of members taking advantage of K2's blogging feature.  Please remember there is no limit to the number of people in your organisation who can blog and also note you can post separately to "Events" which will appear on the Kabissa calender.

Member Spotlight: Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET)

This month, Sokari Ekine interviews Dorothy Okello, the founder and director of WOUGNET. WOUGNET (Kabissa profile, website hosted on Kabissa) has been a Kabissa member since 2001.

The Open Training Platform is a UNESCO funded open access free online project which provides training for trainers and trainees.  There is a huge range of topics - ICTs, Gender issues, languages, HIV/AIDS, media, development, adult literacy and agriculture to name a few.  This site is such a brilliant resource for learners, trainers and anyone working in the non-profit sector.

Theme:  LEADERSHIP AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA.

 

Africa is blessed with hundreds of languages (Nigeria alone has about 300 - not dialects but languages).  With the ever expanding use of the internet and other media and use of Western languages, many of our indigenous languages are in danger of being lost forever.  

TalkaSoft - Soro is a Nigerian initiative consisting of software which simultaneously translates from English into Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa.

StartUps Nigeria by Loy, is probably the most interesting and long awaited blog on technology in Africa. The idea behind the blog is to write about and promote Nigeria Web 2.0 applications and new developments in mobile technology.

 

The Toro region based ICT for Development Research and Resource Centre project initiated by Toro Development Network (ToroDev - Kabissa Profile, Website hosted on Kabissa), a community based ICT4D driven NGO since 2005, has shown such fine model and progressive results that the Stockholm Challenge jury selected it as one of the finalists in the Economic Development category of the 2008 award.

The problem that exists in the Cameroonian education system especially in elementary and secondary education is the problem of quality teaching and that of quality learning. The basic problems in the elementary schools are related to language skills acquisition. Such skills include inability to write, spell, speak and understand. The writer has taught in secondary schools and in the teacher training college for close to 12 years and attests to the fact that students on entry to secondary school class cannot

With gratitude to bytesforall, I learned today about this very meaningful appeal to keep the One Laptop Per Child project on course as a force for freedom in the world, by Richard Stallman, described on Wikipedia as "an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer." I've been following this issue personally, and while I'm not quite as activist a promoter of open source software as RMS, I was crushed when I learned a few weeks ago about Negroponte's plans for Windows on the device.