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National Research and Education Networks

The State of Research and Education Networking in Africa

Dr Boubakar Barry

Research and education networks (RENs) are dedicated networks for the research and education community. Unlike the “general” Internet, often referred to as commodity Internet, they carry only data related to education and research.

RENs were first established more than 20 years ago in developed countries in Europe and the Americas to support bandwidth-intensive applications in research, when it became evident that using the commodity Internet on demand for these applications, and for moving large quantities of data between institutions within a country, between countries, and between continents was not feasible. An example is the transport of data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to various research centers worldwide.

RENs have also been places of innovation in networking technologies and have substantially fostered scientific collaboration at national, regional and international levels.

Why are research and education networks crucial for Africa?

RENs have a huge potential for improving the quality of education and research. The gain in productivity through access to high-speed networks for teaching, learning and research activities is obvious. For Africa, access to such networks through RENs is even more important for various reasons:

• African researchers are isolated. There are very few institutions that have the critical mass of researchers in any particular field to allow them to collaborate and carry out research activities with world standard outputs. Having an adequate NREN infrastructure can enable remote collaboration and the building of the needed critical masses;
• Resources are scarce in Africa, and some equipment and applications are too costly for single institutions: NREN infrastructure provides a means of sharing such resources. In fact, RENs can even provide a more efficient mean of sharing human resources by using video-conferencing tools for remote lecturing while at the same tile avoiding expensive and sometimes risky travel;
• Cutting-edge research is increasingly carried out by multiple, inter-disciplinary research teams located in various countries of the world: coordination, data exchange and even experiments are mostly done using the global REN infrastructure. Not being part of this global community means that African researchers cannot participate in such global research projects;
• In most African countries, higher education faces a big challenge called massification: due to lack of investment in infrastructure and equipment during the last two decades, universities and other higher education institutions cannot efficiently meet the high demand for access to higher education. Here again, REN infrastructure can support e-learning applications and blended learning models that can help reduce the pressure on the universities’ physical infrastructure and address the increasing legitimate demand for higher education.

The state of research and education networks in Africa

The first African RENs emerged in the early 2000s. Today, NRENs exist in all parts of Africa, with of course various levels of development. The existing NRENs can be categorized into the following groups:

1. Well established NRENs: these NRENs have an organizational structure, a legal status and a physical network, meaning that NREN member institutions are interconnected. Examples include TENET, KENET, SudREN, MARWAN and EUN;
2. Established NRENs: these NRENs have a legal status and an organizational structure; they are working on establishing physical connections between the member institutions. Examples include TERNET, RENU and GARNET;
3. NRENs in formation: these are initiatives in various countries where a process has started towards the establishment of an NREN. Such initiatives have been initiated in countries such as Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali and Togo.

Beside the establishment of NRENs, efforts have also been put into forming regional RENs. To-date, there are 3 RENs that can be considered as RRENs in Africa:

UbuntuNet Alliance: this is the first RREN that was established in Africa; from its initial founding members in November 2005, it has grown up to 13 member NRENs. It’s membership area is Eastern and Southern Africa;

WACREN: the West and Central African Research and Education Network was established in August 2010, but efforts to have it established go as far back as 2006; its membership potential (West and Central Africa) is 22 NRENs, although only 2 NRENs have been formally established in this area;

ASREN: the Arab States Research and Education Network was formally launched in December 2010. Although it embraces countries outside Africa, it is considered as one of the African RRENs. ASREN can be considered as an extension of the EUMedConnect Project network, an initiative funded by the European Union that connected Mediterranean countries to the pan-European network GEANT.

Lessons learned in the establishment of RENs in Africa

The REN Unit of the Association of African Universities has been involved in most of the initiatives that have been described above by providing support for the policy development processes at national or regional level, by providing support at the policy level, by facilitating the dialogue among stakeholders and through capacity building.

Many lessons have been learned in the various processes, among which the following are highlighted:

Establishing a research and education network (either national or regional) is about putting resources together in order to get more value for money and foster collaboration. Thus, trust matters a lot. Building trust among the stakeholders is key, not the needed resources. If resources are available and trust doesn’t exist among the stakeholders, the initiative won’t last long. One can say that 80% of the efforts have to be put into social engineering; it’s the key for success;

Not all potential members of an NREN or RREN will be ready to join at the same time. There are different reasons for that: lack of awareness, lack of adequate infrastructure (no campus network for example), lack of trust, etc. It’s important to start with those who are ready, but leave the door open for other to join later without discrimination, as and when they feel they are ready to do so. So, the motto should be: “start small, be open and scale up”;

Champions should be identified and supported: research and education networking is new, or even unknown to most of African higher education leaders. It is therefore important to support champions who understand the issues at stake, through provision of awareness raising material, capacity building, etc.;

End-users (researchers, teachers, students, and administration workers) should be involved in the early stage of the REN establishment process. Not only because they can constitute an important pressure community to move the REN agenda forward, but mainly because they must understand the advantage of RENs and be part of the driving force;

Inadequate telecommunication regulation can be a big barrier to the establishment of NRENs, and can even jeopardize the establishment of RRENs. It is therefore important to approach telecommunication regulatory authorities and establish strategic partnerships with them; experiences in West Africa have proven that this can help in removing barriers;

Government involvement: in Africa, RENs can hardly be sustained at the outset if not supported in any manner by government. Having the backing of government, especially the ministries in charge of higher education, research and telecommunications is crucial. Such support does need to translate, in the first instance, to financial support: the recognition of the importance of the establishment of RENs can in itself open many doors. There is enough evidence of this: the World Bank support to the governments of Kenya, Mozambique and Senegal (to name a few) for the support to the establishment/strengthening of the NRENs in these countries; the decision of the Agence de l’Informatique de l’Etat of Senegal and the National Information Technology Agency of Ghana, both managing government networks, to allocate capacity for the interconnection of universities in these two countries, are examples that could and will certainly will be emulated.

Best practices

Best practices are important to share among communities. In the field of research and education networking, the following practices (to name just a few) have proved to be strong factors for fostering the establishment of RENs:

• Setting up and managing a REN is a full-time job: RENs should appoint full-time CEO and CTO as well as full time support staff as early as possible;
• Member institutions should value the services of a REN and contribute from the beginning; not necessarily in cash, but alternatively in office and NOC space, staff (even part-time), etc.;
• Solidarity is a good, traditional REN practice; however, members should be ready and willing to pay for the service they receive;
• Openness is key for the successful establishment of RENs: all potential member institutions cannot be ready at the same time; in fact, some potential members do even not exist when a REN is established. A good and fundamental practice in the REN community is to be open to future memberships, without any discrimination.

Challenges and opportunities

The challenges for the establishment of RENs in Africa are well known, and won’t be developed here, but just to enumerate a few:

• Inadequate telecommunications regulatory environment in most countries;
• Misunderstanding by operators of what REN traffic is, in comparison to commodity Internet traffic;
• Near-monopoly position of operators in many countries; at continental level, 80% of international traffic is controlled by only 8 operators (need to diversify);
• Costly access ztechnology still used in many countries (VSAT), but this is changing;
• Lack of human resources with the requisite skills;
• Sustainable power supply.

However, there are many opportunities:

• The growth of sub-marine fibre cables capacity in the continent from 320 Gbs to more than 20,000 Gbs within two years;
• The development of country and country-to-country fibre backbones;
• The increasing commitment of governments;
• The “REN message” that is more and more receptive to governments and the private sector;
• The increasing support of the private sector;
• The existing strong African research and education networking community through the AfREN platform and meetings, convened by the Association of African Universities;
• The just started implementation of AfricaConnect, a joint European Union-African Union project.
• The support of friends of Africa worldwide.

What can the various stakeholders do?

Universities/Research centers: appoint full time campus network managers; allocate budget for running/expanding state of the art campus networks;

Governments and other political bodies: allocate capacity for universities/research centers interconnection on government backbones, where available; set establishment/strengthening of research and education networks as tool for the development of education and research and for social development as a priority when negotiating with development partners;

Development partners: recognize and support research and education research networks as essential tool for improving education and research and for promoting international collaboration and socio-economic development.

Conclusion

Research and Education Networks are being setting up throughout Africa. Despite the challenges champions are been facing these last years, there are clear signals that the main actors (higher education and research institutions, policy and decision makers, the private sector, especially telecom operators) have become more aware of the importance of RENs for African development. The global bandwidth to sub-Saharan African universities has gone up from less than 1Gbps three years to over 12Gbps now.

With the start of the implementation of AfricaConnect, a truly regional network will start rolling out. It is certain that African universities and research institutions will soon connect regionally and globally at a level that has never been experienced before, for the good of collaboration between Africa and the rest of the world and for the good of humanity and development.

Written by Dr Boubakar Barry on June 30, 2011 in National Research and Education Networks.
Tagged: Afren Africa AfricaConnect ASREN Boubakar Barry GARNET KENET MARWAN massification NREN REN RENET RENU RREN SudREN UbuntuNet Alliance WACREN | Trackbacks