Building Educational Data Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa

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Data Networks and Sustainability Education in African

Universities: A Case Study for Sub-Saharan Africa

Journal: International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education

Manuscript ID: IJSHE-07-2014-0111.R4

Manuscript Type: Research Paper

Keywords: data networks, sustainability education, research and education networks, internet in Africa, climate change in Africa

International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education

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Data Networks and Sustainability Education in African Universities: A Case

Study for Sub-Saharan Africa.

G. D. Bothun, Dept. of Physics, University of Oregon

Abstract:

Purpose: To provide a case study report of the development on data networks and initial

connectivity in the Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region and how that development evolved into

the formation of Research & Education networks that enable new collaborations and curriculum

potential.

Approach: This case study is told through the last twenty year’s operations and field activities

of the Network Startup Research Center (NSRC) at the University of Oregon, who in partnership

with the National Science Foundation have worked together to significantly train network

engineers in Africa on how to develop regional research and education networks that can link

together the various research universities in SSA.

Findings: We show how the development of these networks have fostered improved

collaboration between African and US scientists, particularly around issues that relate to climate

change. We include testimonials from both scientists and on-the-ground key directors in Africa

about the value of these improved networks. The expansion of regional research and education

networks has allowed the Association of African Universities (AAU) to launch sustainable

development as one of its new Core Programs over the period 2013-2017. Within this new core

AAU program are four sub-themes: Agriculture and Food Security, Water Resources

Management, Climate Change and Energy. All of these themes will benefit directly from these

new, network enabled, data sharing abilities

Originality: The experience and operational competence of the Network Startup Research

Center at the University of Oregon needs to be detailed and espoused. No other American

university has had such an impact factor on Africa in terms of improving its overall network

infrastructure enabling new kinds of collaborative research on real world problems such as

climate change and resource depletion in Africa.

Practical Implications: We assess the current state of network driven curriculum and

curriculum exchange between African universities and compare that to the early days of

academic network penetration (1990 -2000) in the US to find similar rates of evolution. As of

2015, SSA has sufficient network access and connectivity to now enable a wide variety of new

collaborative research and collaborative academic programs.

Key Words: Education and Research Network, Data Networks, Sustainability Education,

Internet in Africa, Climate Change in Africa

Article Classification: Case Study

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I. Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provide a case history study of the development of data networks

in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and the subsequent linkage of various African universities and

university networks. Here we summarize key milestones in the development of these research

and education (R&E) networks and their evolving connections to various universities within the

SSA region. In addition, we document the new scientific collaborations that are now made

possible by the existence of these networks and include testimonials from US scientists and

African network operators on the overall effectiveness of these new R&E networks. In the end,

these networks offer the chance for African Universities to offer new kinds of courses and

curriculum and to better integrate real world data into these new academic programs. A very

good sign of progress is the 2013 adoption by the Association of African Universities (AAU) of

a new core program related to sustainable development within the SSA region. This program

effectively leverages the improving state of R&E networks in SSA.

As the development of network infrastructure in the United States and Europe was accelerating

during the 1980s, many other parts of the world were not keeping pace. Such a growing and

pronounced digital divide, if not corrected, would eventually prove to be very detrimental to

these disadvantaged regions in the world. SSA in particular, had very poor information and

communication technology (ICT) infrastructure (Fuchs & Horak, 2008; Lishan 1996). More

recently, the 2013 Dalberg report documented specific network growth in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria

and Senegal concluding that conditions were quite positive for continued success and growth.

Over the last 20 years, as documented in this paper, scientific data networks linking together

various African Universities have been steadily evolving to ultimately improve the state of R&E

in SSA The development of these R&E networks is a necessary step to bring in new forms of

research and training for students at African universities.

Overall, worldwide investment in data networks together with continual gains in information

technology and communications (ITC) capability have rapidly increased the overall ability to

produce, manage, distribute and analyze data. But it takes some time for content creation to

flow across this improved ITC capability. In this regard, the evolution of network infrastructure

in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is in a similar state to what the US was in the 1990s. Reflecting

on the US, it becomes clear that new educational programs and content which leverage improved

ITC capability, take many years to develop. This can also be expected in the case of improved

networks in SSA; it will take some time for curriculum and content to flow across these networks

and, as documented below, it is really only since about 2013 that the first generation of Research

& Educational Networks (RENs) are starting to connect African Universities in a way that

potentially allows for new curriculum programs, including better efforts at producing a

sustainability curriculum.

Academic content across US networks was facilitated through two important milestones: the

Telecommunications Act of 1996 established the E-rate program for American Public Schools.

Through this E-rate, connectivity charges to individual school districts were heavily discounted

which then provided access for those institutions and access opens many new curriculum

possibilities. Secondly, in April 2001, MIT announced their OpenCourseWare initiative where

the University would make all its curriculum materials available, for free, on the Internet. In

2007, UC Berkeley launched complete academic courses on its You Tube channel. Both of these

large scale Open Course initiatives came many years after the establishment good network

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infrastructure and good last mile connectivity to the American home or business. These last mile

issues are crucial for content to flow across networks and SSA is still afflicted with significant

last mile connectivity issues, as described below.

Similarly, in SSA after 15 years of increasing network infrastructure to various African

Universities, the Association of African Universities (AAU) have adopted sustainable

development as one of the new academic core programs over the period 2013-2017. That

program as outlined in the AAU 2009 report notes that the four sub-themes within this new Core

program are: Agriculture and Food Security, Water Resources Management, Climate Change

and Energy. Quoting from that report:

One of the ways through which higher education institutes in Africa can promote food

security is in the area of capacity building - enhancing the ability of individuals, groups,

organizations and communities to address their food and nutrition security challenges.

This will require promoting appropriate technologies, devising curricula and creating

research networks in the African higher education system.

The need for R&E networks to support this core program is vital and much of this contribution is

a case study on the history of the development of these needed R&E networks in SSA.

In addition to opening up possibilities for various kinds of core sustainability curricula, increased

access to data sources should facilitate data driven policy decisions at both the national and

international levels (Arzberger et al. 2004). Improving policies and education in issues of

sustainability often requires a better quantitative assessment of various kinds of resource usage in

different economic sectors. In turn, this can lead to policies that can achieve reductions in

consumption without significant sacrifice to the quality of life and/or economic status of the

individual consumer. Heeks (2010) and Valk and Fourati (2013) discuss and analyze the role

that ICT can play in catalyzing development and economic growth on regional scales and

emphasize the point that regulatory frameworks need to develop to enable ICT rather than

restrict its use (e.g. VoIP was once illegal in South Africa - Chetty et al. 2006).

The improvement in regulatory frameworks has now (end of 2014) allowed for significant

expansions of network capabilities in SSA. For the year 2014, many important large scale fiber

optic developments occurred (Song, 2015). Among the highlights are:

• The approved installation of the South Atlantic Cable System (SACS) which connects

Angola to Brazil is scheduled for completion in late 2016. In Northern Africa, a new

undersea cable project linking Tunisia and Italy was announced.

• Two existing African undersea cables initiated upgrade projects to double their capacity

so that to reach 1-10 terrabit per second of continuous bandwidth.

• The development of terrestrial fiber backbones throughout Africa greatly accelerated in. According to Song (2015) approximately 70,000 km of new fiber was either extended or planned in 2014 via 11 different projects. About ½ of this new extent is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

With the establishment of high speed connectivity and data networks throughout many regions and in many universities in SSA, the region stands poised to better deliver real time data on a various environmental issues to students all over the region. Data informs and raises awareness and with raised awareness comes a call to action. The new core program in sustainable development implemented by the AAU is a good first response to this call to action – now made possible by the last 20 years of work to develop these robust networks.


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II. Outline of Methods The descriptions, results and reflections in this paper are based largely on oral history interviews with NSRC personnel and written email correspond exchanges with various on the ground key personnel in Africa. Many of the activities described below (see Section IV) are based on internal white papers and reports written by the various agencies that have been assisting in internet development on the African continent over the last 20 years. Effectiveness of these programs is largely evaluated by including personal testimonies of some US scientists that are now able to actively collaborate with their African counterparts precisely because of this improving network infrastructure. Future predictions about the development of sustainability curriculum and research areas related to sustainable development come from time history analysis of the situation in the United States. That is, one can build networks, but the development of academic content and research partnerships that leverage these networks is never done in parallel. There is significant lag time between the infrastructure development and application development. This was the case for the US and is currently the case for SSA. The single biggest source that informs this manuscript occurred in 2005 via a conferenced titled: Workshop for Enhancing Collaborative Research on the Environment in Sub-Saharan Africa - (Jan 24-26 Arlington VA). By employing these methods, a consistent and comprehensive narrative is formed on the evolution and impacts of Internet access in SSA, who the major players are, and the collaborations that have resulted. This story has never been told before in one place and here we link it to enhancing the potential for shared, collaborative academic programs to develop with issues of sustainability at their core. Indeed, this is exactly what has now happened within AAU core program initiative.

III. The Evolution of Research and Education Networks in SSA.

The following organizations have played a significant role in catalyzing the early development of the Internet for research and education networking in SSA.

• The Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA): Their mission is to increase the viability of higher education in Africa via many mechanisms and the building of data networks is one of their priorities. Their accomplishments over the years 2000-2010 can be found in their 2010 internal report (PHEA, 2010).

• The International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC): As an institution whose mission is to support research in the Global South, IDRC was quick to realize the important of ICT infrastructure as an enabler research.

• International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP): Initially based within the International African Institute, the organization moved under the auspices of the European commission in 1996. INAPS works closely with ICT experts to help establish digital scientific libraries (Bonamici et al. 2010). The most noticeable success in SSA is in Kenya. According to Meoli Kashorda Director of the Kenyan Education Network Trust (KENET)

The local network is growing and we are now busy encouraging ICT directors to think of new, innovative ways to use the network and high-speed Internet access. Campus networks are now an important area of focus even as we expand the national network.


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• Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe (DANTE): DANTE is committed to build and operate high-speed networks to enable global research and education. In July 2014, a major milestone was complete for Africa with the launching of UbuntuNet (detailed more below). To quote from their chief international relations officer:

Today through the collaboration with GÉANT [www.geant.org], the UbuntuNet network is boosting EU-African collaboration, bringing research and educational opportunities unprecedented in Africa. The implications for socio-economic development go far beyond anything we could have dreamed of before, putting African research on the map and transforming the lives of millions. I am very proud that GÉANT is the first R&E network to connect to Africa!”

In addition to those organizations, the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC), based at the University of Oregon, has assisted in the development of many of these data networks. NSRC has a long and productive history of collaboration within numerous African Universities thorough the AAU with a particular focus on training of locally based Network Engineers. NSRC receives support for its activities from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), Google and Cisco systems, and additional contributions from dozens of public and private organizations.

a) Improving Scientific Communication in Africa

The role of NSRC has been catalytic in the implementation and development of sustainable scientific networking in Africa. NSRC responds to request for assistance in the development and enhancement of network infrastructure for collaborative research and education, while promoting teaching and training via the transfer of technology. NSRC’s primary objective is to help build network expertise, infrastructure and local engineering capacity, especially in areas of the world where inadequate research and education network connectivity poses a significant barrier to collaboration with US scientists and educators. The improved communications resulting from these efforts enhance collaboration among scientists and engineers across regional and national borders. In turn, this ensures a wider variety of ideas, information, talent, and resources to solve problems and, more specifically, regionally based environmental problems. The roots of NSRC trace back to a volunteer effort to support networking in Southern Africa. In

1988 Randy Bush (co-founder of NSRC) designed and helped deploy a multi-country (South

Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and later many others) university network using varying

technologies, such as FidoNet on dialup lines, UUCP on dialup lines, low-cost dial-up IP

technology, and finally multiple, dedicated TCP/IP links to the public Internet. For the first half

of the 1990s, NSRC served as a major gateway between FidoNet and the Internet, moving more

than 3000 messages per day, many coming from the first networks in Africa to employ email for

international communications. Bush provided the first full Internet connection to Rhodes

University in South Africa in November 1991, which was actually the first TCP/IP link to a sub-

Saharan African country. The link was initially a 9.6kbps analog connection from South Africa

to Bush's house in Portland, Oregon. Universities in neighboring countries, including Botswana,

Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Zambia, received UUCP email feeds from this link, which became the

starting point for several academic and research networks in the region.

In 1992, an award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) allowed various academic networks to connect with the National Science Foundation’s academic network, NSFNET. In Africa, these connections occurred in South Africa (1991), Egypt (1993), Zambia (1994), Kenya (1995), Morocco (1995), Tanzania (1996), Ghana (1996), and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1997). During these early years, NSRC helped plan, fund, organize, and teach in their annual network training workshops and meetings in South Africa, Ghana, Togo, Uganda, Senegal, Mozambique, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco and Egypt. Working closely with African


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Internet pioneers, NSRC helped facilitate the creation of the African Network Operators Group (AfNOG) in 1999-2000 as a forum for technical coordination and cooperation among African Internet service providers, industry and network engineers building research and education networks in the region. This led to the formation of the African Research and Education Network group (AfREN) in 2006 during the AfNOG event in Nairobi, Kenya. These linkages have greatly improved collaboration among US Scientists and those in the SSA region (e.g. Zeleza, 2002). The formation of these networks and access to data among African scientists is critical to having as much science as possible inform environmental planning and decision-making.

A noticeable milestone which recognized the importance of scientific data networks occurred in

2005 with the Workshop for Enhancing Collaborative Research on the Environment in Sub-

Saharan Africa - (Jan 24-26 Arlington VA - Hartnett, D & Semazzi, F (2005)). This workshop

identified 5 important scientific issues relevant to the environment and societal needs of SSA;

these include: 1) climate change, 2) biodiversity dynamics, 3) animal and human disease, 4)

land-use and land cover change, including ecosystem responses to anthropogenic environmental

change, and 5) water resources. Savannas, grasslands, and forests are the most important

ecosystems supporting human livelihoods in SSA but are also the most rapidly changing

terrestrial ecosystems in SSA.

This workshop identified need (Hartnett & Semazzi 2005) for significant investment in IT

infrastructure to support integrated, multidisciplinary research. These areas include networking,

training, capacity building, and data management. NSRC activities have enabled

partnerships/collaborations among scientists, policy makers, and the communities that are

potential beneficiaries of the research. A specific recommendation from the workshop to enhance

communication and connectivity was to support the development of a web-based

database/directory of researchers, projects, institutions, and organizations involved in

environmental research and training in SSA.

One current example of this is provided by the hydroclimate project for Lake Victoria (HyVic),

which is run out of North Carolina State University as part of the World Climate Research

Program. The primary purpose of HyVic is to develop an understanding of the climate over Lake

Victoria Basin (LVB) and improve its predictability and projections to support decision making

in the region in the wake of documented declining water resources. A critical uncertainty in the

future is the amount of urbanization that will occur in the LVB area as well as changes in water

circulation patterns and temperature. This inclusion of urbanization effects could significantly

alter outcomes and resulting policy. HyVic will build an international network among HyVic's

research, operational, policy-making and stakeholder communities that leads to resilience to

climate variability and change in the region in the coming decades. NSRC is a critical partner in

HyVic’s implementation of this vision.

Recently HyVic has launched a Climate Change Post Graduate Training Program in

collaboration with higher education institutions in Rwanda. This degree program is intended for

students interested in careers in planning or policy and professionals working in government

agencies or private sector firms concerned with planning or setting policies affected by global

climate change and climate variability. Core course content includes methods of risk analysis to

evaluate options for dealing with climate change. Unique training in climate communication will

support a new generation of practitioners able to reach multiple publics/stakeholders effectively

about the climate issue. Partnerships with multiple cross-disciplinary faculty and agencies will

enable broad “hands-on” experiences in a variety of climate sectors and multiple career

pathways.

Without a robust and reliable R&E network, this kind of post graduate training opportunity

delivered by US scientists to African students would be difficult to offer. NSRC has provided


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critical support for HyVic to participate and engage in the African computer networking

workshops it organizes along with its partners. As a result, HyVic, in partnership with the

UbuntuNet Alliance regional network, has incorporated internet networking as a component in

its 10-year science and implementation plan. This development has resulted in an important

broader impact. The Africa Climate Research for Development (CR4D) Network and Program,

formed by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP), is adopting elements of HyVic's

internet networking strategy in its continental agenda. In the implementation phase, over the next

3 to 4 years, HyVic and CR4D will rely on NSRC for expert technical guidance and help to

consolidate the collaboration it has helped to initiate with the computer networking community.

Data management issues were a central theme at the workshop because of their critical role in

conducting interdisciplinary research. Issues raised included the need for enhanced investment

in data rescue/digitization programs, promotion of a culture of free sharing of data through

policies and incentives, development of clearinghouse databases for archiving data for

supporting interdisciplinary collaborative research, and expansion of accessible digital libraries.

Recently, NSRC and UO digital library staff worked in conjunction with Senegalese digital

archive specialists at the Archives du Sénégal in Dakar. The project was to create a digital

archives collection of colonial era archives from the National Archives of Sénégal. This was

done at the request of US historians and political scientists at Stanford University and the

University of Oregon seeking to access the archives via the Internet.

At the 2005 workshop there was also strong emphasis place on the enabling role of IT

infrastructure. NSRC plays an effective role for the science community by helping to incubate

and assist with the building of national and regional research and education networks (NRENs

and RRENs) through targeted capacity building activities and collaborative partnerships with

universities, network service providers, and industry and government agencies in Africa. NSRC's

focus on teaching, training, disseminating information, and providing technical support to

international colleagues contributes significantly to the development of stable computer

networks, managed by local hands, in many countries all over the world. Effectively expanding

NSRC model of working with technologists building university networks and nascent NRENs

enables development of more available and connected resources, thereby fostering more

sustainable regional collaboration mechanisms. Improved R&E networks advance national and

regional development opportunities and foster greater collaborative possibilities.

b) The Role of Universities

Academic institutions show considerable variation in how they approach and implement

sustainability. Some might concentrate on minimizing their ecological impact through changes

in campus operations and others might emphasize sustainability in the curriculum. Alternative

strategies might involve various outreach activities and/or sustainable development principles in

their overall development strategy. Regardless of the particular focus, the universal first task

higher education must undertake is to educate students in the current quantitative scale of

consumption and in the use of a systems theory approach to thinking about sustainability

problems in this more quantitative context (Pappas, 2012).

For developing regions in the world, the initial step in exercising this responsibility requires

effective communication and data sharing among the various Academic Intuitions, which in turn

requires a scientific data network. Thanks in part to the efforts of NSRC and many in-region

partners and collaborators Kenya and South Africa now have well established operational

research networks in place. Other African countries are working feverishly to develop their own

research networks. In the last several years, we have seen research networks begin to operate in

Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Zambia with research networks in formation in

almost a dozen other African countries. These established and emerging research networks


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allow African scientists to more easily gather and share data, collaborate with US scientists, and

to develop new university programs that can greatly improve the environmental literacy of

African university students.

One example of an emerging scientific network is the Africa Array project, which is a program

designed to strengthen the training of geoscientists and researchers in Africa. The program is

hosted by Penn State University and relies heavily on improved network infrastructure, much of

which is provided by NSRC, to deliver training content and to share data. Well-trained

geoscience professionals are a key component to sustainable development as demand grows for

Africa’s natural resources. The program utilizes a network of shared scientific observatories

(broadband seismic stations) and data across Africa as the foundation of the training and research

programs. The first phase of the AfricaArray occurred in 2005—2007 and established ~25

permanent seismic stations that are network accessible. Starting in 2010, additional sensors and

weather stations were added to these facilities. These facilities are now all linked together via

relatively high-speed network connects. This locally generated data, across 25-30 locations in

Africa is an invaluable resource for students and researchers.

c) New Network Based Science Initiatives IN SSA In addition to the HyVic and AfricaArray projects described above there are new initiatives in place or coming soon that are currently seeking help to improve their network capabilities to improve data access for various science research and/or education activities. All of these activities will require growing national and regional R&E network infrastructure. NSRC has received requests from US scientists to support international science education activities in a number of domain sciences. As one example, NSRC continues to assist with capacity building of network engineers in the UbuntuNet Alliance community who has been engaged to support African, European and US researchers coordinating HyVic. Additional examples of existing and emerging projects that require robust data networks and data sharing now include:

• Project THORPEX: This research is designed to accelerate improvements in the accuracy of weather forecasts to reduce and mitigate the effects of natural disasters on society via more timely and informed decision-making. Several IRNC backbone networks are key NSF investments that should be leveraged in providing critical communication infrastructure for the THORPEX program.

• The African Network of Scientific and Technological Institutions (ANSTI), which engages African universities and research organizations in the fields of science and technology. The principle object of ANTSI is to “strengthen the regions capacity for training and research and for establishing services for intensive and purposeful utilization of Science, Engineering and Technology for development.’. Growing R&E networks are needed to help meet this objective.

• African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA): an international project (Redelsberger et al. 2006) studying West African Monsoons (WAM) and their evolution with time in response to climate change. This is vital to better develop strategies related to water resource management, food security and reducing the socioeconomic impact of the observed variability in the WAM season. A similar project known as the West African Monsoon Modeling and Evaluation (WAMME) closely studies the land-ocean-atmosphere interaction and subsequent evolution of aerosol dust during West African monsoon development. This dust component is very important. It is now widely believed that the very quiet 2013 Atlantic Basin Hurricane season was due to significant suppression of cyclonic development to the large amounts of Saharan (dry) dust kicked up into the upper atmosphere (Prospero & Mayol-Bracero 2013). Clearly, better understanding of the interaction between WAM induced Saharan dust and subsequent


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intensity of the hurricane season of large importance. For both the WAM and WAMME, reliable data sharing networks are vital to their success.

• The IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC), headquartered in Nairobi, is an active climate research community in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda as well as Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzani. They are specifically tasked with detailed various levels of drought conditions throughout these regions. As noted by Artran (2014), one of their principle challenges is to overcome the relatively sparse hydro-meteorological observational network. Since the rain in these locations is often highly localized (and torrential), this sparse coverage does not provide an accurate record of daily precipitation. There is a strong need to develop wireless sensor networks to better sample these areas and this, in turn, requires much more robust and reliable wireless networks that communicate directly to the RRENs.

IV. History of major NSRC activities in Africa.

Initial network startup in Africa occurred in 1991- Figure 1 shows the location of all 32 SSA startups as of late 2013: a) Overview

Figure 1: Geographical Location of NSRC startup nodes in Africa since 1991. Averaged over time, 2 new startup facilities per

year have come ON line.

In addition to providing physical infrastructure NSRC is dedicated to improved network operational capacity among local network engineers in order to physically improve the campus network infrastructure so researchers can make optimal use of their international R&E links. The guiding principle for virtually all of NSRC’s activities involves the training and cultivating of local expertise in order to build meaningful networks that can be locally sustained. Through


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hands-on, lab-based networking programs and a train-the-trainers approach, NSRC provides in-depth technical training to network technicians from various R&E institutions to increase network engineering expertise that eventually helps to manage and promote improved educational content delivery. Since its first activities in 1987, NSRC has carried out over 250 technical training and network engineering assistance programs in 40 African countries. As most of the coordination occurs within African Universities, the potential for greatly improving sustainability education is significant. African university networks have become a launch-pad for technical and political leadership around national communication infrastructure. In numerous countries, folks who were entry-level network engineers supported by NSRC have gone on to take up national leadership position around information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure. An early example of this was the formation of the Kenya Education Network (KENET), initially headed by Victor Kyalo. NSRC first interacted with Mr. Kyalo in 1993, and with the help of funding from NSF, the first TCP/IP link was established in Kenya which then lead to KENET in the early 2000s, the first NREN in Africa. Mr. Kyalo has recently become the first CEO of the ICT Authority in Kenya, thanks in no small part to his continued association with NSRC and he writes:

Over the years developing total broadband connectivity has been a main focus of both the Government of Kenya and the University Community. From the onset NSRC has been a partner indeed especially in the areas of capacity building and in the realization of optimal network schemes for institutional networks. This has been manifested much more so at KENET where working with NSRC, I did receive tremendous support including networking gear which saw the initial development of a robust network. This in turn has created a centre of excellence in networking and data communications which is now influencing positively development of systems in government as well as playing a key role in the integration of ICTs in ur education system at all levels. Thanks to the synergies created by KENET and partners like NSRC, the era of digital services delivery is slowly becoming a reality. Victor Kyalo Former Founding CEO, KENET Current CEO, ICT Authority, Kenya

These new career opportunities offered by NSRC assistance in developing new R&E networks may help the well documented “African Brain Drain” problem (Easterly & Nyarko 2011). Holm (2012 discusses the particular movements of academics within Africa itself. This movement is driven by a) local academics that are seeking higher paying jobs outside of academe and b) scholars that seek better paying university positions within the more developed African countries. Much of the migration of scholars is toward universities in South Africa. In principle, the development of robust R&E networks in Africa can provide some leverage against this brain drain as intellectually driven residents now have access to more knowledge resources and better training thus minimizing the need to physically re-locate to obtain these services. However, as detailed below, there are still significant last mile connectivity issues throughout Africa.

b) Current Network Status in Africa For context, as of end 2012, Africa contained 15% of the world’s population but only 7% of the world’s internet users. As of July 1 2015, the internet usage had sky rocketed to 27.5% (Internet


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World Stats 2015) There is evidence that Internet access is vital for economic growth (Qiang & Rossotto, 2009) and for vastly improving education and knowledge dissemination which positively effects overall human development. Africa is clearly now on that trajectory. Moreover, enormous progress has occurred with Internet development in Africa as multiple new submarine cable systems have created 40 times more bandwidth to the African continent than existed three years ago. National Research and Education Networks have played critical catalytic roles in the development of both undersea cables and terrestrial fiber networks. The Tertiary Education and Research Network (TENET) of South Africa was one of the first major customers on the SEACOM cable system followed by the previously mentioned KENET. These two movements spearheaded the inspiration to build the UbuntuNet Alliance, which is the regional Research and Education Network for all of Eastern and Southern Africa. This alliance is the principle means to secure affordable and efficient broadband access for African NRENs. The rise of a youthful, entrepreneurial and well-educated vanguard of Africans, armed with affordable broadband access, is the key to Africa’s future. African universities are among the key national institutions with the skills, equipment, personnel and mandate to generate new knowledge through research and education. In order for African universities to help serve the goals of national development, they require the mechanisms and resources to build bridges between academia and policy leaders, and to provide opportunities for African researchers, educators and students to collaborate locally and internationally. While this increase in broadband to the shores of African countries is helpful, there remain serious last mile connectivity issues. Approximately 44% of the population is located at a radius greater than 25 km (15 miles) from the nearest fiber node (Hamilton, 2012) yet last mile connectivity issues are extremely expensive compared to the more developed areas in the world. This is primarily the result of a lack of market completion between various “last mile” connectivity vendors; in South Africa, for instance, there is only one licensed vendor (Telkom). As bandwidth to African universities increases, the bottlenecks shift to the campus network level, as most African university campus networks are currently inadequate to provide access for innovation to their large user communities and so there is a clear and pressing need for continued investment in the R&E network space. The emergence of the UbuntuNet Alliance for Research and Education Networking has created the organizational framework for various NRENs to emerge. Some of this activity has been done in partnership with NSRC. The table below, organized by historical data of “turn on”, summarizes the current NRENs in Africa

Table 1: Summary of key moments in SSA connectivity and network development.

Network Name Country Year Notes KENET Kenya 1999 Aims to connect all higher education institutions in Kenya;

University of Nairobi is the lead

TENET South

Africa

2000 Provides Internet services to some 160 campuses of 54

partners including universities, research councils and other

qualifying institutions.

TERNET Tanzania 2002 Involved 52 higher education institutions in Tanzania

ultimately to be all connected

SUIN Sudan 2004 Since the beginning of October 2009, SUIN has been

operational under the umbrella of the Association of Sudanese

Universities (ASU) which is a non-governmental organization

body for all tertiary education and research institutions in

Sudan.

RENU Uganda 2006 Designed to bring together public and private research and

higher education institutions in Uganda whose core mission is

to provide a better education and research environment geared

towards the development of the country.


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iRENALA Madagascar 2012 Links 6 public universities.

ZAMREN ZAMBIA 2014 Lead by the University of Zambia and designed to provide

advanced ICT services to its Universities and research centers.

WACREN Nigeria 2015 This is the emerging hub for the West and Central African

Research and Education Network. At time of this writing,

only Nigeria has an operating physical network within this

region.

c) Recent NSRC Activities in Africa Over the last 5 years, NSRC has been engaged in:

• The development of 2 Regional R&E networks in West and East Africa.

• The launching of the Tanzanian Network Operators Group (TZNOG)

• NSRC worked with Indiana University (IU) to support US and African network engineers

and students to attend the Summer of Networking program, plus taught during the six-

week summer sessions held at the IU campus in Bloomington, Indiana. Students returned

to their institutions in Kenya, Ghana and Zambia to improve their respective national

R&E networks and assist with building out core network infrastructure on university

campuses.

• NSRC helped the African Network Operators Group plan, fund, organize, and teach in their annual network training workshops and meetings in Egypt, Rwanda, Tanzania, Gambia, Zambia and Djibouti. Working closely with several African colleagues and long-term collaborators, including the NSF, NSRC helped facilitate the creation of the African Network Operators Group in 1999-2000 as a forum for technical coordination and cooperation among African Internet service providers and network engineers building research and education networks in the region

• NSRC facilitated the creation of the African Research and Education Network Group (AfREN) with the Association of African Universities (AAU). This is a major organizational milestone for improving environmental scientific research and knowledge sharing along with the development of University curricula in these areas.

• Facilitated rollout of wireless access points at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar, Sénégal and provided critical hardware, guidance and hands-on assistance to complete a high-speed wireless link to support the Senegalese NREN (snRER). NSRC facilitated donations of switches, routers, wireless access points and long-range antennas as steps towards improving connectivity and access for a number of science departments. The African School of Physics 2014 program is held on the UCAD campus in Dakar (Acharya et al. 2014).

• Provided direct engineering assistance in the form of personnel and equipment donations

to design and improve campus networks at numerous universities in Bangladesh, Bhutan,

Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Sénégal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. (IM and BI)

• In 2011 begin to offer workshops on Wireless Sensor Networks. Such Networks

ultimately will become the most relevant data source for actually measuring the

environment and/or the rate of environmental degradation, which ultimately will become

important primary source material for better environmental decision making.


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• In November of 2013 NSRC worked with the UbuntuNet Alliance and trained over 15

network engineers and trainers to better teach network topics, provide direct engineering

assistance and to use NSRC virtual training environment for hands-on, lab-based

trainings. NSRC provided new hardware to the participants who, then, went and trained

several hundred additional network engineers within 6 months of attending the workshop

in Rwanda.

• April 2014 donated equipment and personnel time to the Kenya Education Network

(KENET) in Nairobi, Kenya to build a remote training lab that has been used for training

numerous engineers from KENET member institutions.

• November 2014. NSRC-UbuntuNet Train the Trainers program in Lusaka, Zambia. 17

network engineers from 8 countries trained.

• During 2014 and 2015 assisted NSRC trained engineers in the UbuntuNet Alliance to

provide direct engineering assistance for 8 institutions of higher learning in Kenya,

Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

• Since January 2015, an NSRC engineer has been working to help setup GANETI, which

is an open source Virtualization Platform connected to KENET member Universities and

research institutes. Part of this process has also involved testing a Video Conferencing

solution to support research collaboration between South African and Kenyan

researchers and faculty.

d) Testimonials supporting NSRC activities in SSA

The previously described activities have all served to establish an ever evolving R&E network in

Africa which is greatly enhancing educational and research opportunities. We offer the

following testimonials to the educational and research gain that can occur in the developing

world by improving network reliability and network access to greater resources. These

testimonials come from US scientists (who wish to remain anonymous here) engaged in research

on various environmental issues in Africa as well as network personnel on the ground at African

universities:

Testimonial 1: Based on my previous experience in climate modeling research collaboration

with partner institutions in Africa, it is clear that cyber infrastructure is one of the leading

limiting factors to scientific progress. The goal is to expand its scope to the rest of Africa in the

next phase of this initiative. While the NSF allocates millions of dollars to fund a large volume

of environmental research in SSA, the full potential of these initiatives will never be realized

under the present poor cyber connectivity conditions. Recognizing that transformational

discovery often occurs at the interface of individual disciplinary endeavors, there is compelling

reason to build an international interdisciplinary African community of scientific scholars in the

area of the environment to maximize the impacts of NSF support. This need has been recognized

by the National Science Board, which encourages NSF to strengthen international cooperation in

science and engineering with developing countries. NSRC are leaders in creating consensus

across multiple disciplines that improved cyber infrastructure and greater use of IT, are critical to

support interdisciplinary collaboration in the key areas of training, literature and data

management, computing, and distance learning in Africa. NSRC is uniquely positioned to

provide strategic guidance and expertise to getting African researchers connected from the

desktop to the grid for collaboration with the US R&E community. The Africa Climate Research


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for Development (CR4D) Network and Program will rely on NSRC for expert technical

guidance and help to consolidate the collaboration it has helped to initiate with the

computer networking community. The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

(UCAR) Africa Initiative (UCAR 2015) and follow-on initiative, which I am also playing key

role in, will be a major beneficiary of NSRC’s proposed capacity building activities.

Testimonial 2: UbuntuNet Alliance as an organization and as a community of National Research

and Education Networks (NRENs) in Eastern and Southern Africa has worked with NSRC for

many years. Our community has particularly benefited from capacity building programs that

NSRC has run for network engineers in the areas of campus network design; advanced routing

and many others. Last November at our annual UbuntuNet-Connect conference we worked with

NSRC in organizing a Train the Trainers Workshop, which was very successful. We have seen

the workshop bearing fruit as the trained engineers went home to train others. As a follow up, 8

in-country workshops have been organized in Zambia, Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda,

with up to 25 participants each. This has helped scale our efforts and amplified the impacts to

more African universities. Institutions in the UbuntuNet Alliance membership region have

benefited from Direct Engineering Assistance from teams from NSRC. Last year a team of

engineers from NSRC spent some time at Copperbelt University in Zambia, and together with

local engineers installed a wireless campus network, thereby increasing Internet access to the

university population. In May this year, 2 Universities in Uganda benefitted from equipment as

well as network redesign by a team from NSRC working with local trainers that attended the

Kigali workshop. Two similar events are planned to take place in Tanzania in August 2014.

These and many other initiatives that NSRC has run over the years is enabling African NRENs to

mature technically and in turn enabling African researchers, teachers and students enjoy new

teaching and research collaborations with African and U.S. scientists and educators.

Testimonial 3: NSRC worked with NCAR to organize and deliver a workshop on “Science and

Cyber infrastructure in Africa”. Participants identified challenges to atmospheric science in

Africa and offered ideas for improvements, with human capacity building through R&E

networks as the major pathway. NSRC’s mission to maintain and expand R&E networks

supports Unidata’s mission to provide data services to African researchers. The success of the

Unidata internet Data Distribution (IDD) depends on robust and stable networks, which NSRC

provides. In addition, the COMET program, established in 1989, is a world leader in geoscience

education and training. Our training partners in Niger and Kenya identified the lack of reliable

and stable network as the main training impediment. As of 2012 this training impediment has

been removed thanks to the efforts of NSRC and we recently were able to offer our first ON line

meteorology class to researchers in Africa.

Testimonial 4: The Kenyan Universities and Research Institutes leadership had recognized

the importance of high-speed data networks for supporting education and research by 1999 when

they constituted the Kenya Education Network Trust (KENET). KENET was going to be the

vehicle for high-speed connectivity among educational and research institutions in order to

promote research collaboration and sharing of educational materials. Today, KENET is a

broadband network interconnecting 175 campuses of universities and research institutes. The

universities depend on the broadband network for their operations, to support e-learning, and for

collaboration among faculty and researchers in Kenya and globally. The network is operated by a

small team of about 25 network engineers and technical staff many of whom have

benefitted from NSRC and AfNOG training and support. The network of NSRC engineers have

worked with senior engineers at KENET to train ICT staff of connected universities in different

areas including campus networks and network management. The donations of used switches to

Kenyan universities have improved campus networks that support operations, learning and

research – (from: Meoli Kashorda – current KENET director.)


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While the above testimonials are not directly related to improving sustainability education in Africa, they do serve to reinforce the basic notion that reliable computer data networks, in the current world, are essential to improving the research and educational capabilities of everyone

V. Current Status of Higher Education efforts in Sustainable Development in SSA In May 2011 survey results (GUNi 2011) from 73 higher education institutions in SSA were published by the Association of African Universities with respect to a questionnaire that focused on 5 areas of sustainable development within the context of higher education: a) institutional governance, b) curriculum, c) research, d) campus operations and e) outreach and services. The main results of this survey that are:

• 60% of the surveyed institutions reported as having “multi and interdisciplinary structures for research, education and policy development on sustainability issues”. As discussed earlier, policy development on sustainability issues is best done in a data driven environment and that requires robust NRENs and RRENS.

• Regarding communication and public awareness strategies on sustainable development only 5.5% of the survey institutions were rated as excellent. This is testimony to the need for good “packaging” of information so as to make an impact on public awareness. Often such good packaging requires the use of broadband video whose network delivery locally in Africa is compromised by the kinds of last mile connectivity issues that NSRC is involved in resolving.

• 60% of the surveyed institutions reported as having established some form of sustainability partnership with other universities, governmental agencies, research centers, and corporations within other African and European nations. These partnerships include “education programs, capability projects to develop leadership in sustainable development, library capacity building, resource and waste management strategies, issues of climate change, renewable energy projects”.

• In terms of actual implementation, the majority of institutions identified energy conservation initiatives as their primary goal. However, a secondary goal was identified as “developing compulsory courses in sustainability. This implementation is now reflected in the new core curriculum areas as previously described.

• At the time of this study (June 2010) there was a great deficit of available interdisciplinary courses that dealt with the various dimensions of sustainability offered by African universities and virtually no ON line presence in this curriculum area. In addition, most institutions reported on the lack of good facilities or infrastructure for teacher training and professional development. Furthermore, very few of the surveyed institutions are actually developing materials in environmentally sustainable development. Hopefully the implementation of the new core curriculum will make a dramatic improvement here.

The survey report concludes with this paragraph:

Despite the existence of sustainable development initiatives in universities in Africa, involvement is still low in most universities due to various reasons. A number of universities identified barriers such as lack of funding, lack of awareness and information, lack of human resources and lack of university and national policies among others. A lot still needs to be done to promote sustainability actions in African universities. It is encouraging that positive outcomes are being realized from


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involvement in sustainable development even though most of the initiatives are still in their infancy. It is therefore important not to lose the momentum gained to improve the current sustainability status of African universities.

Such a conclusion could have been written about the United States 25 years ago (circa 1990) as network/internet infrastructure was much inferior then to what it is now. In particular a) most research Universities were not connected to each other and there was no useful, reliable, or robust data sharing network; b) last mile connectivity issues in the US were severe and the majority of citizens had no access; c) ON line course delivery was basically non-existent; d) investments in the developing of R&E networks were not being made as there was little vision about their ultimate importance. As mentioned in the introduction, there are parallels between the network evolution in the United States and the current network evolution in Africa. There is significant lag time between the creation of infrastructure and the flow of content and knowledge capital across that infrastructure. This leads to a slow emergence of educational applications. For instance, in the US, it was not until 1999 that the first course learning management system (e.g. Blackboard) became available. The emergence of ON line degree programs did not take full force until the mid-2000s, as by then, last mile connectivity issues no longer existed in the US. This is not the case for SSA. However, as documented above, the year 2014 saw extensive increases in various Fiber Optic Networks. An April 2014 report by the UN (Macharia 2014) claims there are now 754 million connections (mostly mobile) in SSA which represents a substantial penetration. This report also stresses the current problem in South Africa which, while having abundant undersea cables coming to shore, making those last mile connections to homes and businesses remains challenging. This challenge exists largely because private investment in last mile connectivity in SSA does not exist. In addition, there is only one telecom operator, Telkom that is allowed to provide last mile connectivity. This conundrum, often repeated in other SSA countries is the current limiting factor in the access to new kinds of curriculum and programs within connected African universities. The following direct quote from this report is salient:

“Fundamentally, the biggest issue holding back access is the slow pace of the regulatory

process,” Arthur Goldstuck, a South African ICT industry analyst says. “If the policy

directives aren’t forthcoming, then regulatory advancement is not forthcoming,”

Hence, it is quite clear that without adequate infrastructure (including last mile connectivity), content that leads to improved training and education in the developing world will never happen. In this context, the activities of NSRC and the other agencies discussed here are crucial in the future development of Africa. NSRC has made great efforts to involve local personnel in the design and maintenance of scientific networks that ultimately will benefit the development of various regions in Africa and these R&E networks offer African universities the opportunity for better realizing many of their articulated aspirational goals in the area of environmentally responsible sustainable development.

VI. Reflections

In a very broad sense, Academic Institutions have an obligation to be leaders in the generation

and transmission of sustainability knowledge and best practices. Declining environmental,

economic, and social conditions world-wide require a steadfast and reliable response from the

academic community. This places a great deal of responsibility on higher education to move

beyond its current sphere of academic influence and assume responsibility for becoming a

catalyst for regional change and better sustainable development practices. However, whether in

the US or SSA, the development and delivery of curriculum and courses in sustainability remains

quite challenging. This challenge was addressed in detail in a 2010 study (AASHE 2010) by the


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Association of Sustainability in Higher Education and the discussed obstacles are largely

ubiquitous in higher education.

Sustainability principles and practices are inherently interdisciplinary. Universities by in large

are organized into departments which often live in their own universe – disconnected from the

larger curriculum issues of society. The difficulty of integrating an interdisciplinary approach to

teaching and learning in American Universities is, by now, quite well documented (Amey &

Brown, 2004; Bees & Dee, 2008; Harris & Holley, 2008;). While the term “interdisciplinary” is

may be widespread in the lexicon of Higher Ed it has yet to morph much beyond “writing across

the curriculum” (Kinneavy, 1983). In practice, it remains a multi-discipline approach in which

student’s broker courses, usually taught by a single professor, together into something that might

be called “environmental studies”. A truly interdisciplinary approach would integrate discipline

biases and frameworks into an intellectual theme and this approach needs to be taught by more

than a single professor in the room at any one time. These points are raised here to provide

better background on why, a coherent set of courses in sustainability are now just appearing

within the AAU system as defined in their 2013 initiative. In that sense, the AAU has made

more progress than most American Universities.

Existing courses and curriculum based on how citizens can shape a sustainable world are still

mostly isolated and not part of any mainstream curriculum. The curriculum which has been

developed is often narrowly shaped by a discipline-specific bias; sustainability is best taught

from a systems viewpoint. Social, economic, physical and environmental spheres all integrate to

shape the choices that are available for improving sustainable resource management and

sustainable development. Teaching from the systems approach requires interrogation of the data

that show how the various system components operate (e.g. Pappas, 2012). In that sense,

sustainability is a Big Data problem, as it has many different data dimensions and the

development of the R&E networks of SSA now provides a means for the kind of data transport,

sharing and analysis that would be an integral part of the systems approach to sustainability.

This systems approach as applied to SSA was first discussed in Maborgunje’s (1995) paper on

The Environmental Challenges in Sub Saharan Africa. This work provides a comprehensive

overview of the situation 20 years ago. In that paper he states:

Efforts to deal with these problems, however, have been handicapped by a real failure to understand their nature and possible remedies.

This is essentially an educational issue and speaks directly to the need for improving information

and data access to so that the nature of these problems is better understood and disseminated.

This is precisely the driver for building and improving R&E networks, not only for educational

purposes but for improving general citizen awareness. Currently Africa and especially SSA are

at a critical nexus with respect to sustainability. Africa has had a long history of trading resource

depletion for economic gain. In addition, the quest for foreign direct investment often leads to

compromises in the enforcement of environmental laws. Lundgren et al. (2013) provide a

framework for analyzing the future natural resource depletion in SSA as either one that could

lead to prosperity or one that leads to total ecosystem failure. Quoting from that paper:

If the legislature, civil society and the general public are given a clear and

comprehensive picture [access to information] of the contributions made by the extractive

sector, with policy proposals and prospects, it is more likely that mistakes will be

corrected and good alternatives will be considered.

This is very much a call to action. Citizens and students in SSA must be better informed about

what is actually happening to their ecosystems and this requires access and tools to understand


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various data. Indeed, high resolution satellite imaging capabilities make it now impossible to

keep large scale exploitation of natural resources (like deforestation or the effects of mining or

oil extraction) hidden.

One example is provided by NASA’s Images of Change gallery in which are available a large

number of comparative high resolution images of the SSA region. The example shown below

reveals the extremely rapid rate of urbanization and subsequent land and water changes for a

region in Ugunda over a 34 year period:

Figure 2. A region of Uganda images over a space of 34 years at the same resolution showing the dramatic increase in local

urbanization

How many actual citizens in Uganda have even seen this image? This is exactly the kind of

“data” that can now be incorporated into sustainability education resources. Hence, through

increased awareness and attitude re-orientation, fostered by dissemination of environmental

knowledge through African universities via R&E networks, individual and communal action

could be a vital force in the end in achieving ecologically friendly sustainable development and

indeed, may be the only vehicle which will be effective.

As we enter the age of the Internet of Things, we have an unparalleled opportunity to capture

information about some of the most important ecosystems in the world, many of which are in

Africa. Well-networked African universities will have the necessary cyber infrastructure

foundation to establish sensor-network-based research projects that can bring a completely new

level of insight into complex ecosystems, which in turn can better inform the development

process. In turn, education in sustainability must also respect local cultural values and behaviors

in students that allow them to make educated and informed sustainability decisions. This

requires communication and discussion of these cultural values. In the case of SSA, in order to

be successful at the community level, the message of environmental management has to reflect

traditional African values. A quantitative data-driven process in which relevant data becomes

available to all planners in easily accessible forms can assist effective sustainability planning.

The described efforts to build out R&E networks in SSA now offer the possibility of better

integrating real world data into curriculum efforts aimed at developing sustainability education

as a core program.

VII. Summary:


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Underlying network and information infrastructure is a necessary, but not sufficient element to support global research collaboration. High speed Internet access is now a sine qua non of a modern university. Researchers expect to be connected, to be able to access resources anywhere in the world and to be accessible to others. While this is certainly true for the US and Europe, without support for network development, African universities were at risk of becoming completely marginalized, bypassed by research funders and ignored by up and coming researchers who would choose a connected institution over an unconnected one. Internet access has allowed African universities to avoid certain challenges, such as the massive cost of maintaining an up-to-date research library. Faculty and students in connected institutions can now access up-to-date resources, journals, which positively contribute to educational quality. In the recently released Thomson-Reuters report on academic reputation among world universities, the section on Africa shows that all of the improved Universities are those based in South Africa and among the SSA nations, South Africa has had the longest period of consistent and high-speed connectivity to various data networks and the Internet. This strongly suggests that the building, scaling and maintaining of robust data networks is what will help improve the state of Research Universities and their associated programs and curriculum. NSRC has provided decades of assistance to help develop this infrastructure and human resource capability. By linking this directly to African universities and creating regional and national research and education networks, African universities are now in a much better position to a) collaborate with US scientists and b) offer new kinds of training and research experiences for their students. For example, the AfricaArray and HyVic projects are aimed at improving public planning and development processes in various places within Africa by forming regional scientific networks that allow various researchers to share data and models so that more science can be injected into future development plans. NSRC’s overall strategy of training local personnel on all aspects of network operations raises the probability that these networks will be sustainable and continue to evolve in their R&E capabilities to better promote the kinds of collaborative activities that ultimately will improve sustainable education and development within SSA. Acknowledgments: Most of the material presented here was the result of a gracious interaction with the personnel of the NSRC, specifically director S. Huter, D. Smith and H. Allen also provided important accounts of recent NSRC activity. I also wish to thank S. Song for updating this material and for his excellent efforts to document continuing improving telecommunications infrastructure on the continent.


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Documents

Building Educational Data Networks in Sub-Saharan Africa