By Duncan Martin Inevitably the roles and activities of an NREN impact upon those of commercial service providers as participants in a competitive industry, and it is important for an NREN’s management to think about and manage the NREN’s relations with commercial ISPs. One objective is to cultivate the ISP’s understanding and respect for the …
The Open Access global community received a major boost in May 2016 when delegates to the fourth Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) Conference on Electronic Publishing adopted the ‘Dakar Declaration on Open Access Publishing in Africa and the Global South’. The Dakar Declaration calls on scholars/researchers and students, policy …
36 of the 54 countries on the African continent do not have operational National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) representing 66 percent of countries lacking operational NRENs on the continent. This has been revealed in a recent report released by the World Bank titled the “Role and Status of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) …
66 percent of African countries have no operational NRENs- World Bank Read More »
Better late than never! This seems to be a fitting phrase for the Malawi Research and Education Network (MAREN) after the network successfully tested its eduroam service in June 2016 to become the fifth NREN within the UbuntuNet Alliance membership region to launch the service after KENET, TENET, ZAMREN and RENU. eduroam is a service …
It is a known fact that universities and research institutions the world over are launching and being involved in inspiring and cutting-edge research and collaboration projects by each passing day. However, sharing the progress and impact of these projects with the rest of the global community seems not to be a top priority for concerned …
Digging up research and collaboration stories from NRENs Read More »
Over 50 million researchers, academics and students across Europe and Japan are set to benefit from a direct 20Gbps (gigabit per second) connectivity injection into the pan-European GÉANT network, celebrated at the launch event of the upgraded Japanese Science Information Network (SINET5) in Tokyo last month. The capacity boost came in response to the increasing …
Connectivity boost accelerates EU-Japanese science collaborations* Read More »
By Duncan Martin NRENs exist to meet the connectivity and related needs of the universities and research institutions of their countries. But who determines these needs and who judges whether they are being met? If most of these institutions are essentially sub-departments of the State, to the extent that their procurement of Internet services is …
The NREN’s relationships with governments and ISPs: An expert’s opinion Read More »
That many African higher learning and research institutions are facing funding problems is not news. Most universities across Africa are struggling to operate to their full potential due to underfunding, a development that has in some cases forced universities to resort to hiking fees already considered high for many an African student. The raising of …
A task force comprising ICT directors from seven higher learning and/or research institutions has been established to fast track the formation of a National Research and Education Network (NREN) in Lesotho. The “Task Team” as it is being called, was proposed during a ‘Lesotho NREN sensitisation workshop’ that was held in the capital Maseru on …
Lydia Chabala, an soil scientist from Zambia can still not predict the amount of time and money it would have taken and cost her to complete her PhD research if she had not been introduced to the Zambia Research and Education Network (ZAMREN)’s high speed internet connectivity. Chabala’s research focused on soil-environmental modeling for digital …
