On Ispon Software Bazaar

The entire world is shifting from traditional style workmanship to a techno savvy work environment.
More and more companies are now being restructured with advance technology and IT services.
As such, to acquire the latest in technology, software development has become the main means of doing business in the world today also resulting in the flourishing growth of the IT Industry.
Software development may include research, new development, modification, reuse, re-engineering, maintenance, or any other activities that result in software products.
Unfortunately Nigeria’s software industry has been disappointingly neglected despite the country’s size and both economic and political importance.
Available record revealed that Nigeria spent over N23 billion on the purchase of foreign software products between 1995 and 2008.
Over 90 per cent of the software used in Nigeria is imported thereby creating enormous capital flight
As a matter of fact, Nigeria remain one of the biggest importer of software products in the Sub-Saharan African continent and such as become a dumping ground for software products emanating from software companies mostly in India, UK, Ireland, Middle East, Brazil and so on.
The problems of locally made software have been compounded by no clear cut frame work or guideline to design or market made-in-Nigeria, high cost of access to ICT, poor infrastructure capacity development, legislation lacuna, inadequate human capacity development, inadequate funding of ICT programmes, inadequate awareness on the part of policy makers, among others
Luckily, help is coming as the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (Ispon) unveiled initiatives to make software development an important key to national economic development.
The association is to establish software bazaar for local software developers to ensure that indigenous software dominate the industry.
The software bazaar is a distributed revision control system designed to make it easier for anyone to contribute to free and open source software projects and will be held every last Saturday of each month.
 It requires indigenous developers to show demos on the capability and efficacy of their products before users drawn from different spheres of the country’s economy.
Indigenous software in the country has been battling with the problem of low patronage,
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek welcomes  this development in the hope that it will also help build between indigenous developers, users as well as other partners in resolving standard issues.
It is important that government, big companies and in deed Nigerians support this laudable project.
There is also need for relevant government agencies to develop a national policy framework to ensure that local vendors are not mere commission agents.