Buganda Post » Tech

Uganda In New Weather Forecast Program

Marlow Kasozi — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:10:26 +0000

Uganda is on the forefront of a new initiative in Africa from the Global Humanitarian Forum. The new program was launched at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction meeting in Geneva. This new project intends to deploy 5,000 automatic weather stations across Africa mounted on mobile phone masts. These weather stations will gather data such as rainfall and wind conditions and distribute the information to national weather agencies across the continent. The first 19 stations have been established around Lake Victoria in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.

Kofi Annan, former U.N. chief and current president of the Global Humanitarian Forum, said, “The world’s poorest are also the world’s most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change, and the least equipped to deal with its consequences.” He went on to add, “Today you find cell phone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale, until now.”

Today about 70% of income in Africa is from farming, most of which relies on natural rainfall. However, up to know the ability to accurately predict rainfall and wind patterns has not been available to the majority of farmers. In comparison to Europe’s thousands, the entire continent only has about 200 weather stations.

Facebook Launches Swahili Version

Marlow Kasozi — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:39:16 +0000

Following Afrikaans, Swahili is the second African language to launch a Facebook page. In the past five years Facebook use has been spreading all over Africa to become one of the most popular social networking sites on the continent. A group of Swahili scholars approached the California based Internet firm to get permission to launch the new version of the site. The organizers of the Swahili version said that they launched the new version to safe guard the future of their language.

Facebook tested the new feature for months. And they claim that 60% of users in East Africa are already using the new Swahili version. The bulk of Swahili-speakers live in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, and Mozambique.

Facebook already exists in some 60 language versions.

Luganda Web Browser Developed by Makerere Students

Chris Bijugo Lumu — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:47:06 +0000

South Africa based translate.org.za has created a Luganda version plugin for the Mozilla Firefox 3 web browser. This special addition to the Firefox 3 browser was developed in partnership with Makerere University and Rhodes University. Over 200 Makerere students participated in a “Translate@athon” working on translating different aspects of Firefox 3 into Luganda during the first week of August.

Translate@thons are the creation of translate.org.za which is a non-profit organisation producing Free and Open Source software that enables and empowers South Africans. The Translate Project started in 2001 with the vision of providing Free and Open Source Software translated into the 11 official languages of South Africa.

Researchers at Rhodes University conceived of the idea to apply the translation service to Luganda. The role of Makerere students was to use a special web-based tool called Pootle which allowed as many 200 students to simultaneously translate English into Luganda. After translating the words and phrases same tool allowed them to rapidly correct technical and language errors.

A computer expert, who Buganda Post spoke to in Kampala, said that the Luganda browser shows a lot of promise but much work still needs to be done. The initial (beta) version can be found at http://translate.org.za/content/view/1817/51/.