OLPC Ethiopia

2007 status: green
green

see also the Ethiopian Millenium Gift Project

Open source communities

EFOSSNet

10-20 active members? To clarify. Working with gtz, perhaps on an upcoming school trial

working languages

Also see below; a very few people on small scales are working on non-amharic working languages.

GTZ Ethiopia

Working actively in Addis and elsewhere. See Thomas Rolf (thomas.rolf(at)gtz.de)

ecbp, a joined program of the MoCB (ministry of capacity building) and GTZ, works with 2 schools (30 notebooks each) in Addis to get first experience.

trained roughly 80 university teachers in eLearning and 150 students in open source and started an open source newsletter. (from a while back)

Todo: add OLPC materials to these workshops and emphasize local creation for young audiences

Language/s

Which language or languages are to be used? There are about 81 languages presently spoken in Ethiopia, but we are not going to target all of them. Though there are many factors that are going to decide which languages are going to be available for the Ethiopian millennium, the number of volunteers committing to the project will be the deciding factor. Everyone should have the chance to work on his/her own language. These are the 10 languages with the most speakers:

1. Amharic
2. Afan Oromo
3. Tigrigna
4. Somali
5. Guragie
6. Sidama
7. Welayta (and related languages)
8. Afar
9. Hadiyya (and related languages)
10. Kafa (and related languages).

A realistic goal for the millennium would be a complete Amharic version and partially complete Afan Oromo, and Tigrawi versions.

Do they all use the Ethiopic script? Except Afan Oromo, which has officially been using the Latin script since 1991, all languages use the Ethiopic script, but my guess is there will be people who would like to contribute to an Afan Oromo Ethiopic version too. We will see. If the tools are provided, the volunteers will show which direction the project will go.--Teferra 13:41, 27 May 2006 (EDT)