NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

By Nadia Andrada

I’ve been building open source software technology for NGOs for over a decade, and I have a confession: we’ve been living a lie.

For years, I firmly believed that open source was the moral imperative that would democratize technology for the Global South. I championed platforms that could be freely downloaded, customized, and deployed by anyone. I evangelized the virtues of collaborative development and shared knowledge.