Interesting discussions sprang up during the JoomlaDay Kenya which was held on the 16th March. Joomla users in Africa are numerous and many website rely on the backbone of this famous CMS. But do we really have Joomla developers in Africa?
Dennis Mbuvi of CIO East Africa, did line up the benefits of using Content Management Systems (CMS) and especially Joomla. One of his strong reasons is that, you don’t have to start from scratch (coding) just to put up content online. Joomla and other CMS help in speeding up this process. “Joomla helps publishers to create content easily rather than using developers to publish,” he said during the conference.
The CEO of
Kenya ICT Board,
Mr. Paul Kukubo has other reservations on the development and usage of Joomla in the continent. Joomla is easy to use and easy to extend. “We don’t extend it as much as we suggest it can be extended,” he said. He reckons we don’t have many Joomla developers in Kenya and Africa and hence Joomla users will always be waiting for foreign extensions of the platform.
Commenting on a question posed by HumanIPO, about having a CMS solution for Africa, Mr.Kukubo said that “General principle is that Africa needs everything … Africa needs to be more capable as a continent. Joomla belongs to a community not to the developers alone. The argument is that we need more Africans developing more extensions for the African context”.
Mr. Kukubo left a challenge at the JoomlaDay. The challenge is to developers to work with idea creators to come up with solutions that will answer African challenges in the ICT sector.
