Open source rising in Africa
![dana-blankenhorn.jpg](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/resize/9901f0c28381677d8bf5ced1b5af181cd77e3a1c/2014/07/22/220ebf26-1175-11e4-9732-00505685119a/dana-blankenhorn.jpg?auto=webp&fit=crop&frame=1&height=192&width=192)
![Africa](https://www.zdnet.com/a/img/2014/10/04/3b8a1418-4baa-11e4-b6a0-d4ae52e95e57/africa.jpg)
If you think of sub-Saharan Africa in terms of jungles or primitivism, you're making the same mistake Europeans do when they think of America as the Wild West.
Africa has a large, and growing middle class, spurred on in part by technology, and the flattening of the world described by Thomas Friedman.
My go-to guy here is Emeka Okafor of Timbuktu Chronicles. No relation to the NBA Rookie of the Year, he is instead a New York-based consultant and entrepreneur who follows African business closely. Timbuktu itself is in Mali, at the southern edge of the Sahara, and Okafor's posts specialize in sub-Saharan Africa.
"The creation and building of applications that open-source truly allows will over a period of time help nurture a self-sustaining technical culture," he wrote me recently. "This is critical, above and beyond the fact that it is 'free'."
There are a growing list of African open source resources. There's a Free and Open Source group in Ethiopia, a center for open source called EOCOSS in Uganda, there is Wi-Fi training based on open source, and a Nigerian project called WaZoBiaSoft aimed at localizing open source in various West African languages. The Nigerian Computer Society also posts frequently on open source.
The point is that Africa is a growing market for open source programming and that a rising tide, indeed, lifts all boats.