ANIC is looking for ideas that will transform the way that African media work. This means that your idea should offer significant and tangible improvements to existing tools or techniques, or should propose new ways for African journalists to gather news, tell stories, engage with audiences, or sustain media organisations.
Ideas that have the potential to be replicated or that could scale continentally will have an advantage.
To develop a computer keyboard, software and font package for Ghanaian (KWA) language group
No one is doing anything similar
The local languages in Ghana and neighboring countries form the KWA language group. These languages cannot be written on computer because there is no computer keyboard and software for the languages. Glyphs exist for majority of the characters but they are scattered in different fonts
The team will develop the software and a keyboard format for the languages in KWA language group for Ghana and neighboring countries. We will work with Microsoft to develop a locale for this language group that will contain monetary units and date formats for these countries. We will work with a font developing company to produce the common fonts with all the characters in the KWA languages. We will produce a thousand copies of the keyboard, software and font package for test in institutions in the countries involved.
We have a team of four:
Mr . Atarah is an award-winning journalist. He has written extensively on social, economic, political and cultural issues. His writings have been published around the world
Dr. Richard Manu is a linguist at the University of Ghana. Dr. Manu has done extensive research on the KWA language group
Mr. Kyekyeku Opoku-Pong is an IT project Manager. He brings more that 17 years of hands-on software development and project management skills
Mr Isaac Quarshie is a computer programmer. he is an expert in locale development and Unicode and language formats
The team has already developed and tested two versions of the keyboard and software for Windows. We have worked with Unicode consortium to secure a code for the Ghana monetary unit (cedi) so that glyphs can be developed for it. We have worked with United Nations funded SIL International to include the cedi in two fonts. With funding, we will work on a fully working version of the keyboard and also develop a version for Linux
We will produce the keyboard, the software and font package for sale in Ghana and neighboring countries. We will also work with laptop manufactures to produce customized laptops with the KWA keyboard format. We believe that the keyboard will be a useful tool for journalist in the region
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