| In today’s Information Age, an effective cyber-infrastructure and Internet access underpins development and human welfare by strengthening education and training, expanding science, technology and innovation capability, opening up collaboration opportunities with the rest of the world, and generating the knowledge base for decision-making. Poor Internet connectivity prevents many countries in Africa, especially Sub-Saharan ones, from taking advantage of these opportunities. There are many initiatives from local, governmental, African, European and international organisations to promote, survey and fund networking.
The eGY (electronic Geophysical Year) and Sharing Knowledge Foundation initiatives are based on African scientific communities, and are complementary of other initiatives. Their bottom-up role is twofold: firstly to motivate and support the scientists in each country (1) to ask their government or organisations for a better Internet for research and for education and (2) to organize themselves to welcome new technologies, secondly to promote a better cyber-infrastructure for their universities towards international organisations. In 2007 during the IHY workshop that gathered African scientists from 20 countries eGY provided the results of the questionnaire sent to all the participants to describe the status of internet in the Universities and Research institutes. Then recommendations were written. In 2007 Sharing the knowledge foundation organized a meeting devoted to internet and Grids in Africa. The participants, scientists, industrialists and members of NGO originating from 14 countries wrote also recommendations.
In 2009 the presentation in this session of R.L.A Cottrell and U. Kalim will provide an overview of the evolution of the networking. In parallel to the improvement of internet the development of scientific collaboration among African countries and with Europe by using ICT was considered as an essential point. This presentation will be focused on the recommendations, different achievements and plans (see presentation in this section by V. Ardizzone et al.) . |