The eI4Africa Consortium Members successfully conducted the Project Mid-Term Review Meeting today at the European Commission premises in Brussels, Belgium. The meeting was chaired by Leonardo Flores Anover (Project Officer, e-Infrastructure Unit, DG CONNECT, European Commission) with the support of a review panel team composed of Isayvani Naicker (Director, E4 Solutions) and Dany Vandromme (President, Panache-Conseil).

The meeting was attended by Karine Valin (Sigma Orionis, France / Project Coordinator and WP1-2 Leader), Simon Taylor (Brunel University, UK / Project Technical Coordinator and WP3 Leader), Roberto Barbera (COMETA, Italy / WP6 Leader), Bjorn Pehrson (KTH, Sweden / WP4 Leader), Tiwonge Msulira Banda (UbuntuNet, Malawi / WP5 Leader), Amos Nungu (CoEICT/DIT) and Omo Oaiya (WACREN, Nigeria / eI4Africa Affiliated Partner).

On the basis of the mid-term progress report and a set of 8 deliverables, the main objectives of the meeting were to document, analyse and assess the state of progress of the project thereby providing a better foundation for future project activities. The meeting allowed the eI4Africa Partnership to obtain an objective appraisal of the way the contract is being implemented and the extent to which it is fulfilling its initial objectives. The review meeting also provided an overview of the impact and effectiveness of the project as a whole in relation to its objectives set out in the Project Description of Work.

The meeting started with a quick Tour de Table as well as an overview of the project (objectives, milestones, deliverables, financial resources, main achievement, work-plan status, impact, etc.) by the Coordinator. During the morning sessions the project ‘Dissemination Activities’ (WP2) performed within the first year of the project were presented together with the preliminary findings of the ‘e-Infrastructures in Africa Application Survey’ (WP3)’ and an insight into the ‘African Flagship e-Infrastructure Demonstrators’ (WP4). The afternoon sessions allowed to present the outputs of the 1st eI4Africa workshop (‘On to e-Science’ – Lilongwe, Malawi – May 2, 2013) and the main conclusions of the 2nd eI4Africa workshop (‘An African e-Infrastructure for VRC and their Applications’ – Kigali, Rwanda – Nov. 13, 2013) (WP5). The deployment of the first ever African Grid Science Gateway, the eI4Africa program to deploy Certification Authorities (CAs) and Identity Federation (IdF) across Africa and the report on ‘e-Infrastructure flagship demonstrations from other continents’ (WP6) were also discussed and debated in the afternoon.

The eI4Africa Consortium Members are extremely encouraged by the constructive discussions and the very positive outputs of the meeting. The project activities are very well on track with all mid-term objectives being successfully achieved. Very importantly, eI4Africa’s external reviewers as well as the EU Project Officer expressed their satisfaction with the progress and high quality management of the project. “The eI4Africa Consortium Members are working extremely well all together to achieve their project goals, and until now achieved Excellent project outputs », concluded Leonardo Flores Anover.

“I would like to express my deepest appreciation to all Consortium members for their tireless efforts in getting this set of project activities off the ground. I personally appreciate all the time and efforts that all of them spent in planning and organising the activities and the close attention they paid to every details and to everyone’s goals. We received an “Excellent” mark today and this is due to our joint efforts. Your contributions and commitment made a real difference!” said the eI4Africa Project Coordinator, Karine Valin, to the Consortium Members.

Karine Valin also expressed her gratitude to the Project PO (Leonardo Flores Anover), the Review Panel Team and the Advisory Board Members for the fruitful discussions, their constructive feedbacks and their invaluable comments that will be very useful to the project future work.