Our blog is where you'll find all our project updates, highlights and achievements, as well as other news and events related to iMENTORS
iMENTORS (www.imentors.eu) is an interactive resource, the first of its kind, to contain information about all known e-infrastructures in Africa in the past five years. Launched for public use and input in July 2013 iMENTORS provides you with the necessary tool to visualise e-infrastructures and all related projects in Africa.
Africa as a region and as individual countries, is slowly making a steady progress towards establishing national and Regional Research and Educational Networks (RRENs). Although still in its infancy compared to other world regions such as Europe where each country has an active National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) with established regional networks such as TERENA, iMENTORS database provides evidence for tremendous progress over the past few years.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
According to an article published on SciDev.Net, for scientists across Europe, last month marked the official start of a fresh wave of funding opportunities from the European Union (EU). On 11 December, the European Commission finally released the detailed topics and budgets available for the first two years of Horizon 2020, the EU’s eighth research and innovation funding package, worth nearly €80 billion (around US$110 billion) in total from 2014 to 2020.
Image courtesy of xedos4 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
According to an article published on SciDev.Net, the first day of the inaugural Africa Innovation Summit featured a plenary session on Best Practices in Innovation policymaking. It was a sensible place to start. But some of us have been talking about innovation in Africa for a long time. In 1998 the Africa Union’s Togo Plan of Action from suggested 1 per cent of each member state’s GDP should be invested in research and development. That’s how long this has been in discussion. Since then only four countries have made the target — Malawi, South Africa, Tunisia and Uganda.
iMENTORS is able to synchronize its data with other databases, fully utilizing Open Data and Web 2.0 interconnectivity. Our development team has created API processes to include information from CORDIS and the World Bank database, in order to create the largest online repository of eInfrastructure data.
Join us, learn about eInfrastructure projects in the area you are interested in and contribute your own information to our constantly growing database!
Image courtesy of cooldesign / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
iMENTORS statistics have now been completed for all data recorded up until Dec. 15th! During the last recording period, we added a total of 1398 new organizations and 413 new projects to our database, an increase over the last recording period of approximately 67% and 290%, respectively. In addition, we recorded 330 research infrastructures - a brand new category of information now uploaded and available for search in the iMENTORS database.
Is your organization among the new additions to the iMENTORS database? Check our map today!
Image courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The latest addition to the iMENTORS database is the Connect 4 Change project. Connect 4 Change is a consortium of five Dutch development and ICT organizations collaborating to accelerate the realization of the Millennium Development Goals through the use of ICT. The program supports ICT initiatives in the areas of education, health and agricultural and economic development, and members of the consortium have funded nearly sixty different ICT projects in Africa. The consortium works with local partners in many different countries, including Burkino Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Access and make creative use of the huge amount of data available!
iMENTORS version three went live today and is one step closer to mapping the majority of e-infrastructure (resources, tools and data supporting community research and development) of the past five years in Sub-Saharan Africa in order to lay a foundation for better services, encourage research and connect cross-continental progress. The aim of iMENTORS is to help scientists, universities, research and education networks as well as policy-makers and international funders to gain valuable insights on the gaps and progress made in the region and to identify synergies when planning future ICT initiatives within the African continent.
Louis Papaemmanuel, Business Development- Brand & Product Manager of eGovlab and project director of iMENTORS, will present iMENTORS project in a session called Euro African Joint ICT Research Priorities (Day 4, Thursday November 29, 9.30am) at the 2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT, Lisbon November 28-29.
The "2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT" (an event designed to anyone with an interest in Euro-African collaborative project on ICT) will be held on November 28-29, 2012, at the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) in Lisbon, Portugal. The event is organised by the EuroAfrica-P8 EU/FP7 funded project in the framework of the EuroAfrica-ICT Initiative and with the support of the National Science Foundation (FCT) of Portugal. This major event is the fifth of a series of very successful conferences organised by the EuroAfrica-ICT Initiative under the aegis of the European and the African Union Commissions (EC & AUC): March 25-26, 2009 – Brussels, Belgium, February 4, 2010 – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, December 7-8, 2010 – Helsinki, Finland, November 14-15, 2011 – Cape Town, South Africa.
This year edition of the "Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT" (an event designed to anyone with an interest in Euro-African collaborative project on ICT) will be held on November 28-29, 2012, at the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) in Lisbon, Portugal. The event is organised by the EuroAfrica-P8 Partnership in the framework of the EuroAfrica-ICT Initiative and with the support of the National Science Foundation (FCT) of Portugal.
This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 313203 