This FOSS policy in Africa Toolkit provides relevant background and related resources specifically targeted to support policy-making in Africa. The toolkit promotes an approach that aligns FOSS policy and strategy with broader objectives for social and economic development. The toolkit is split in two parts:

The main report provides a broad overview of how FOSS fits into national ICT policy-making, outlines the areas where governments can take policy decision related to FOSS as well as some of the possible approaches, and lists activities related to FOSS policy from across Africa. It recommends an approach to FOSS policy-making linked to national development goals. It discusses some of the main development goals, and provides direction on how to move from theory to practice. The report part of the toolkit is split into three modules, which represent different steps in the policy-making process.

·         Module 1: FOSS policy background / options and obstacles, provides the reader with a basic understanding of how FOSS fits into the national policy-making process.

·         Module 2: Using FOSS to support national development goals, sets out a framework for policy formulation and combines it with the information from module 1 in a discussion of common policy goals.

·         Module 3: Moving from theory to implementation, outlines practical steps for starting the policy process. It lists general best practice and closes with a number of simple first steps policy-makers could promote.

A set of annexes provides a collection of useful resources that complement the report. They include a background reading list of key documents and reports on FOSS, information and links to the major FOSS initiatives around Africa, and example FOSS policy documents.

During the recent past, a number of resources have been developed to inform policy-makers interested in FOSS. However, the relevance of these documents to African countries is limited because typically they are too general, they disregard obstacles to the implementation of FOSS in Africa, and/or they are based on experiences in developed countries and not applicable to Africa. In addition, empirical ground-level research on the use of FOSS in Africa is still lacking. Nonetheless, a recommended selection of resources is listed in Annex 2.

Further, the toolkit does not provide a comparison of FOSS with proprietary software (although it does touch upon the fundamental economics underlying both types of software), and it does not include technical advice on implementing FOSS systems. Many resources for readers interested in these areas are listed in Annex 2.