Aside from UWC, the Universities which are participating in the project are the University of Jos (Nigeria), Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (Senegal), Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (Kenya), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere University (Uganda), University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Catholic University of Mozambique (Mozambique) and The University of Eduardo Modlane (Mozambique). In addition, a number of other universities are collaborating with the AVOIR project through other means of support, including the University of Ghana Legon (Ghana), the University of Port Elizabeth and Peninsula Technikon (South Africa).

The project was started initially using a grant from USAID's Leland Initiative through its Information Technology Public-Private Alliance (IT-PPA), and the UWC team has been established with funding from Department of Science and Technology (South Africa) and UNESCO. "This grant allows us to bring our African partners in to the AVOIR alliance at last", says Prof Derek Keats, Executive Director of Information and Communication Services (ICS) at UWC. "The project will be based in the Free Software Innovation Unit of ICS, and managed by Melisse Benn", says Keats.

"What we are interested in achieving is to build a cadre of developers around Africa who understand and follow a Free Software approach and philosophy and who develop software that is useful to people, especially in Education", says Benn.

This grant is a great boost for Free and Open Source Software at UWC and in Africa, and shows that UWC is committed to the idea of collaboration in the IT field,94 says Madiny Darries, IT Director in ICS at UWC. According to Darries this is one of several activities in which UWC is involved within the Free and Open Source software domain.

According to Keats, the IDRC grant is a step in establishing an alliance of partners engaged in the development of software, educational materials an in other collaborative initiatives all around Africa. This is an example of how people in their daily activities can support indeed become the African Rennaisance, and help to achieve the goals of NEPAD. We are very grateful to the IDRC for supporting this initiative said Keats.

Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is one of the world's leading institutions in the generation and application of new knowledge to meet the challenges of international development. For more than 30 years, IDRC has worked in close collaboration with researchers from the developing world in their search for the means to build healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous societies.