UbuntuNet Alliance extends its warmest congratulations to WACREN on the successful expansion of its network backbone to include six new countries: The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. This is a milestone not only for WACREN, but for the broader African research and education community. For higher education and research institutions in these newly connected countries, this expansion opens the door to global digital resources: real-time collaboration, virtual laboratories, cloud computing, and richer access to international databases and digital libraries.
This new connectivity is particularly significant because WACREN has now established a 10 Gbps link between Lagos and Cape Town, via the ZAOXI Global Exchange Point, thereby enabling direct peering between WACREN and South Africa’s SANReN network. With this link in place, research and education networks across West, Central, East, and Southern Africa can share data and collaborate without routing through Europe. This reduces latency, lowers costs, and strengthens regional autonomy.
WACREN’s vision goes beyond pure connectivity. They plan to leverage the expanded infrastructure to build a regional climate monitoring platform, deploying WMO-compliant weather stations integrated with LoRaWAN IoT gateways. Additionally, WACREN intends to federate high performance computing (HPC) resources across participating countries, enabling joint simulations and modelling in water, energy, climate adaptation, and other data-intensive domains. Learn more about the impact that these developments will have on the entire region by reading the full article here.
From the perspective of UbuntuNet Alliance, this development is deeply encouraging. It aligns squarely with our own mission to foster pan-African research and education connectivity, by ensuring that not only our own members but all neighbouring networks can interoperate with low latency, high capacity, and resilience. WACREN’s success effectively strengthens the fabric of the continent’s research infrastructure, an achievement we all share.