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Welcome to the EPROM / MOPRA Wiki.
We are a group of Computer Science professors and lecturers from 10 countries within Sub-Saharan Africa. Our group's mission is to teach our students mobile phone application development and facilitate the design and deployment of innovative mobile services for all Africans.
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Motivation
Developing mobile web services that are relevant for the diverse user communities in Africa requires a deep understanding of local life and needs. In the future, we believe that many of the successful mobile web services developed for this continent will not come from the West, but rather from the collective abilities of the thousands of computer science students graduating every year in Africa. To incubate and encourage these activities we are developing a mobile web curriculum for African Computer Science departments across the continent.
Universities
- Ashesi University College, Ghana
- Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
- University of Nairobi, Kenya
- Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, Rwanda
- University of South Africa, S.A.
- Eduardo Mondlane University, Mozambique
- Lagos State University, Nigeria
- Ecole Polytechnique de Thies, Senegal
- Makerere University, Uganda
- University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Objectives
- Create a curriculum designed to empower university lecturers to provide their students with the ability to design and build mobile web services specifically for the unique needs of their own local communities.
- Ensure this curriculum can easily be incorporated into the existing syllabi within Computer Science departments throughout Africa and beyond.
- Develop web-based resources to help students develop mobile web services specifically targeted for the developing world.
- Begin to cultivate Entrepreneurial Mobile Developer Communities within the regions the curriculum is being used.
- Identify additional needs of the developing world that are not met by today’s mobile phone applications (such as local language interfaces and content) through the projects designed by the students to meet the unique needs of their own communities.
History
During the 2006-2007 academic year MIT and Nokia launched a trial initiative called EPROM in East Africa to develop a mobile phone programming curriculum that equips computer science students with the skills to design mobile phone applications specifically for the needs of people in the developing world. While mobile phones are becoming the continent’s dominant computing platform, most computer science courses in Africa currently focus exclusively on programming traditional desktop computers. Through the EPROM initiative, hundreds of computer science students from Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Rwanda were taught the fundamentals of mobile application development. The entrepreneurial emphasis of these courses has lead to dozens of applications designed specifically for the African market. Several of these projects have gathered international media attention, while others are being formed into start-up ventures based in Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and beyond. Building on this previous success, we are now developing a curriculum to empower African computer science students to design and develop their own mobile web applications.
