The 5th African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons, Idlelo5, will take place at the Shehu Musa Yar'Adua Convention Centre in Abuja, Nigeria from 19th - 23rd March 2012. The theme of this Idlelo is "Open source Solutions for Achieving Millenium Development Goals.

ICT@innovation will be taking part and will be participating in several activities under the Networking and International Exchange Pillar.

More networking of African IT specialists with Europe and joint building of advanced training materials – this is what a new partnership of FOSSFA's and GIZ’s ict@innovation programme with the Europe-wide ‘Free Technology Academy’ (FTA) is all about. The Free Technology Academy (FTA), financially supported by the Life Long Learning programme (LLP) of the European Commission, is a collaboration between the Netherlands-based Free Knowledge Institute and three European universities.

We started this year with a new name: Since January 2011 ‘InWEnt - Capacity Building International, Germany’, the ‘Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH’ and ‘Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst gGmbH (DED)’ have pooled their long-standing expertise in the field of international cooperation for sustainable development and are now operating under the name 'Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH'. For more information on GIZ, see the partnership page.