 Anna Badimo, chairperson of LinuxChix Africa, spoke to Daniela Faris about using ICT and FOSS to empower Africa's women.
1. You co-founded LinuxChix Africa with Dorcas Muthoni in 2004. What motivated you to take on this mammoth task?
Dorcas and I founded LinuxChix Africa after we realised that very few women were involved in FOSS, especially at a technical level. Our concern was that most often women get involved in technical projects as support personnel and their technical skills are often overlooked.
2. How did you get involved in Linux, and how has your passion developed over the years?
I started working in a Linux environment when I was doing my PhD and my interest and liking for FOSS developed everyday. I'm now comfortable with the environment but it's an environment where I learn new things everyday. I'm interested in developing FOSS applications, especially the ones that will change the lives of African women for the better. People constantly ask me how ICT and FOSS can be used to help women, and that bothers me, and I believe that as LinuxChix Africa, we cannot consider ourselves as a success until we have answered this question.
3. How does LinuxChix Africa go about fulfilling its goal of helping 'â?¦towards building the critical mass of Linux skills among African women, and to advocate for the use of FOSS for the many community development challenges being faced by Africans, especially African women'?
LinuxChix Africa started as an informal network of women and as we engaged more partners, we realised that we needed to be a formal entity, so we are now a formal NGO and our focus is on the whole African continent. We have a Board of Directors, each representing a region - West, Southern, Eastern, Central and Northern Africa. We have a Council of about 28 members, each representing a Country Chapter. The Board of Directors are responsible for oversight and fiduciary duties and the Council members are responsible for ensuring delivery of our country programmes.
We have participated in Software Freedom Day activities in 2005 and 2006 and our country chapter in Zimbabwe was selected the overall winner of SFD 2006. We have participated technically at WENT (Dec 05, Kenya); Africa Source II (Jan 06, Uganda); AFNOG (May 06, Kenya). We are now preparing for the LCA- AFNOG UNIX Administration course, which is taking take place in Kenya in March 2007.
4. How does LinuxChix Africa advocate for the use of FOSS for the many community development challenges being faced by Africans, especially African women?
We have partners that we will be working with in projects and we are busy with our Blueprint for Advocacy. Our current partner is OSISA and they have elevated us from strength to strength.
5. How do you think the empowerment of African women with ICT skill can help with community development specifically?
Firstly, ICT offers a lot of economic opportunities for women, and with a critical mass of these skills, I think that we will start thinking about how we can make ICT practical for other women, and how we can use it to solve their day-to-day problems. Women will start being creative in areas that are currently neglected by mainstream ICT, like preserving indigenous knowledge, which has been passed from one generation of women to the other. Also, since women are the ones who are often sacrificed when decisions are made in families about education, we want to explore how the FOSS localization tools can be applied to deliver information to women who were not privileged enough to be formally educated. The list is endless - how can FOSS be applied in agriculture, eGovernment, eBusiness, eHealth, etc. and what FOSS business opportunities are available to women.
6. How do you go about coordinating, communicating and organising the women of Africa to make LinuxChix Africa an effective organisation?
Our website and the mailing lists are the heart of our organisation, they form the hub through which all communication take place. We also have an office based at the School of Computer Science, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The office is run by a Projects Coordinator who supports the Country Representatives with their country programmes.
For internal communication, we have a monthly update to all members; and produce LinuxChix News, which is our quarterly newsletter. For external communication, we have a brochure, LinuxChix News. We also make presentations at conferences and workshops, and occasionally write articles for the media and do interviews.
7. What are the issues that LinuxChix Africa is tackling which are different to the other LinuxChix user groups?
We are only starting compared to other LinuxChix groups in other countries like Brazil, USA and Australia, who have been around for longer. We've only been around for two years but we've gone from representing two countries to 28. Whereas our American, Brazilian or Canadian counterparts would have one or two languages ' English and Spanish, Portuguese or French for each region; we have to cater for English, Arabic, French and Portuguese members, as well as other local languages which are unique to each African country.
8. Tell us a story that made you feel that LinuxChix Africa was really making a difference in the lives of African women.
The LinuxChix Africa story that really touched me and demonstrates our potential was for Zimbabwe to be selected as the overall winner for hosting a successful Software Freedom Day Event in 2006, out of all the countries of the world. That was a defining moment for the organisation. And for me to meet Zimbabwean women in South Africa who know about it shows that we might not have delivered a FOSS product yet to change their lives, but it is a stepping stone.
9. Encouraging entrepreneurship and business among women is an important aspect of LinuxChix Africa. Have you managed to succeed with this idea, and are there any example of successful businesses being set up as a result of your encouragement and training?
We encourage our members to venture into business and corporate partnerships by making use of their acquired skills. As we grow the number of these skilled women, a lot will come out of it. We also have members who have their own companies and we encourage that.
10. Your PhD was in Computer Science (Bioinformatics) at Wits University. Have your studies aided your work in LinuxChix Africa, and visa versa?
My PhD helped me to work comfortably in the environment and that helped me to grasp the concepts and be committed to the FOSS cause. Through my PhD I was exposed to languages like Perl, PHP and Python and I program comfortably in Java and C. I even built my own Linux cluster for my research.
Anna's Favourites:
Favourite FOSS software
GIMP, MySQL, Blender
Favourite African woman or icon
There are many but just to list a few: My mother - I gave birth to my son a month before my Computer Science Honours exams and I wanted to give up, and she said to me "Tell yourself you can"; Dr. Mamphela Ramphele (South Africa); Mrs. Zanele Mbeki (South Africa); Mrs. Adekunbi Abibat Sonaike (Nigeria); Dr. Dorothy Okello (Uganda)
Favourite place to run Linux workshops
Kalangala, Uganda. What a beautiful country, I wish the natural vegetation and forests could be preserved.
Favourite LinuxChix mailing list
chix@africalinuxchix.org and femme@africalinuxchix.org, of course. I also use afnog, africasource, idlelo, and linuxchix lists - they're useful sources of knowledge that remain untapped for other women Linux users out there.
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