The Kenyan FOSS based crowdsourcing and incident reporting application Ushahidi is getting great publicity. The application that came out during one of the darkest times in Kenya's history is shining star in Kenya's tech space. See this article that discusses more about its application in other parts of the world.
http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/open_source_for_humanitarian_act...

On 26th October, during Day 2 of the West African ToT, Mr. Samuel Tunde Njoku, a former president of the Nigeria Computer Society, visited the training programme and passed on some words of encouragement to the participants.
Recalling his earlier years as a student in the US, Samuel was glad to note the coming together of FOSS enthusiasts from various countries in Africa looking for ways in which people can better their lives using FOSS based technologies.

On 24th October 2011, the first West African FOSS Business Model took off. About 20 enthusiastic participants registered for the training. The venue for the training is the resource centre in the Ministry of Education Office. After a highly engaging e-learning session it was great for participants to finally meet face-face. Participants are drawn from several west African countries.

After a number of year of FOSS advocacy,governments in Africa are beginning to warm to the idea of FOSS. Last week from Sept. 14-16th 2011 representatives from member states of The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) met in Nairobi to discuss the status of FOSS implementations in their countries.

It was wonderful to hear that governments in Africa are using FOSS in various projects. From simple websites using Joomla to setting up parliamentary record management systems.

During the advocacy session it was realised that the issues affecting FLOSS in the various countries (Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania & Uganda present at the workshop were very similar. The following are some of the items that were raised:
1. The use of the term Free and Open seems to be more of a problem.
2. There are various uncoordinated efforts to promote and advocate for FOSS, sometimes seemingly to undo efforts of the other.
3. Inadequate technical skills to support open source projects.