The “Bungeni Know-How Transfer” workshop, organised by the Africa i-Parliament Action Plan in collaboration with the Centre for Information and Communication of the University Eduardo Mondlane (CUIEM) and hosted by the Mozambique National Assembly, was held in Maputo, Mozambique, from 16 to 20 July 2012.

During the hands-on technical training sessions, software developers from selected African parliaments had the opportunity to learn about the different features of the localisation of Bungeni Parliamentary Information System according to the specific requirements of the different parliaments.

This five-day workshop, through presentations and practical exercises, allowed IT staff attending to gain a deeper understanding of how Bungeni can be localised to fit their own specific requirements. It also provided a good opportunity for discussions on how to plan the successful deployment of Bungeni, as well as to promote the setting up of a community of practice to make the adoption of Bungeni more sustainable.

For the sake of sustainably and future development of Bungeni the University Eduardo Mondlane was involved in the workshop, resulting in the participation of more than 10 students as well as lecturers. The idea was to generate interest around Bungeni, showing that being an open source system it provides a unique learning and academic opportunity, allowing the further development of IT projects while building expertise around Bungeni that could be used to support its deployment in parliaments, but not only.

Five countries (Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Uganda, and Zambia) were given a Virtual Machine with a Bungeni set up with available data and customized looks of their current parliament websites. The Africa i-Parliament technical team will follow up and provide constant support to ensure effective localisation and data migration.

This is a very important step towards the successful deployment of Bungeni within African parliaments, guaranteeing sustainability through concrete transfer of know-how to local implementers and their technical partners, including universities.