Founded in July 2011 in Accra, Ghana, Oasis websoft is a web and an open source software development start-up company that aims to build mobile, web and software solutions that aim to solve real life African problems.
Oasis websoft was founded by Raindolf Owusu. He then took Aaron Nii Adom Nathan and Jeffery Aboagye-Asare to his team to make his dreams true. This guys built Ansi Web Browser, one of Africa’s first.
We met up with the founder Raindolf Owusu and he let us in on what’s happening at Oasis Websoft.
What inspired you?
We decided that four years was too much time for us to only learn in the university. Africa is on the move, and software and technologies are a powerful tool to boost economic growth and poverty reduction. We decided to build home-grown software solutions to solve our own problems here in Africa.
How does it work?
Oasis websoft is not like a typical start-up that focuses on solely one product. Oasis websoft ships code in three phases mobile app development , web development and open source software solutions.
Take us through your work?
We name our softwares “ Anansi “ ( It means spider in the Akan Language ) We have built Anansi Web Browser which is a web browser with unique offline features suiting the internet community in Ghana and Africa. Anansi Operating system is a Linux distribution that is free and you don’t have to buy Office (Word, Power-point, Excel etc.) separately. It comes with Libre Office preinstalled. You are free from Viruses and easy, icon-based desktop interface. With the help of more code contributors we hope to add a bundle of educational tools targeting our educational system in Africa and possibly with a local language ( Swahili and twi etc. ) keyboard layout and localisation of some of these educational tools.We have Anansi mobile application for Windows Phone, Nokia and Android .We recently joined forces with other African developers to develop and launch Africapp. A pan-African mobile application store that aims to serve the growing need of mobile users in Africa and Diaspora.
The beta version of the web browser has over 3,500 downloads on softpedia , the open source community has created torrent files and mirror links for the operating system so it’s had to give an actual figure but our server alone has seen over 4,000 downloads.
Our softwares we build for Africans are freemium. Our web and mobile development services are premium.
Competition?
Related posts
We have a lot of competition. Each and everyday a new start-up is born with the idea to build software to solve problems here in Africa.
We are focused on developing solutions that will help Africans and we being on the ground here in Ghana gives us the opportunity to see the kind of problems here to solve.
Any funding yet?
We have not received any funding yet. We invest in our own projects with the little money we make from web development services.
Partnership, clients?
Here is a list of a few clients we have built websites and web apps for http://oasiswebsoft.com/
Challenges?
Funding and high cost of internet bandwidth. I posted a blog on some of the problems we go through as developers http://raindolf.blogspot.com/
Future plans/expansion etc?
We hope to build more software solutions to solve African problems and also we hope to expand our online school to teach upcoming developers principles and techniques of building software. You see details here.
