Open Source Governance in the Global South - Challenges, Opportunities and Compliance in Africa

Explore the unique challenges and opportunities of open source governance and compliance in Africa and the Global South through this 34-minute conference talk from the Eclipse Foundation. Examine how regional disparities in governance structures, compliance tooling, and regulatory awareness create supply-chain risks as global software becomes increasingly regulated under frameworks like the EU Cyber Resilience Act. Discover the structural challenges facing African developers, from limited access to compliance tools and training to unclear licensing knowledge and inconsistent documentation practices. Learn about emerging community-driven governance models and lightweight compliance workflows adapted for low-resource environments, along with successful examples of African projects contributing to secure open-source ecosystems. Understand how compliance expectations around SBOM requirements and supply-chain attestations impact Global South contributors, and gain practical strategies for organizations to support distributed open-source development. Master governance approaches that improve transparency, code quality, licensing clarity, and long-term sustainability while strengthening compliance awareness to enhance the trustworthiness of the global open-source supply chain. Access actionable insights for building more equitable and compliant global open-source ecosystems, with detailed timestamps covering welcome and framing, the human elements of open source beyond code, practical governance importance, Global South perspectives, African open source challenges and opportunities, compliance explanations, and Q&A discussion.