News & Events

The dawn of the final launch of a new and comprehensive database on einfrastructures across Africa is steadily approaching. After a successful initial round of data extraction and recording, the iMENTORS team has now embarked on the validation of the information, in addition to further data collection regarding any infrastructures that are not yet recorded in the system.

Image courtesy of Victor Habbick / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This edition of the iMENTORS newsletter gives you more in-depth insights into current issues in the world of e-infrastructure, research infrastructure, national /regional research and education networks, ICT and data. Read it online!

Described as a “one-stop-shop data warehouse,” iMentors is a web-based platform serving as a knowledge repository for sharing and aggregating data on e-infrastructure projects throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

Speaking to HumanIPO, Louis Papaemmanuel, project director based at the Stockholm University, said iMentors is a project co-foundered by the seventh framework program of the European Commission. It began in April 2012 and will run until October 2014.

“The objective of iMentors is to aggregate and display information about every e-infrastructure project plus related initiatives such as e-government, e-learning [and] e-health applications over the past five years,” Papaemmanuel said.

Papaemmanuel believes while Africa is one of the fastest growing regions, the continent still lags far behind other regions such as Europe, in terms of developing stable deployment “at least with broadband infrastructures”.

Papaemmanuel said the difference between Europe and Africa in terms of broadband implementation is the fact that broadband capacity in Africa was developed by commercial internet service providers (ISPs).

 A fortnight ago, Google announced that it had donated Ksh. 265.67 million to the Network Startup Resource Centre (NSRC) and another KSh. 111.4 million to the Internet Society(ISOC).

The donation to NSRC will go towards capacity building aimed at bringing network engineering experience to universities across Sub Sahara Africa. Also to benefit are National Research and Education Networks (NREN). The money will go towards building of labs, funding of a train-the-trainers program that will teach skills to experts who will then re-teach the same to staff in educational and research institutions. “NSRC will provide hands-on training on campus network planning, deployment, and management for over 600 university and NREN staff. Their work will bring the Internet to students and staff at over 50 institutions and increase network engineering know-how in Sub-Saharan Africa,” says Jennifer Haroon a Principal at Google’s non-profit arm, Google.org