More accurate weather and climate information is just one of many concrete benefits, as six new countries are included in the high-speed network operated by WACREN, the West and Central African Research and Education Network. The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, and Senegal join the six existing member countries.
WACREN plans to leverage this expanded connectivity to advance its ambitious climate agenda. Building on successful pilot projects in Ghana and Nigeria, the organization will deploy weather stations compliant with WMO (World Meteorological Organization) standards in more countries. These will form the backbone of a regional climate monitoring platform, providing real-time data to support local adaptation strategies.
In parallel, WACREN will launch a data portal, giving African researchers and national meteorological agencies access to terrestrial data streams from meteorological satellites. By combining observations with data from local weather stations, the portal will make critical weather and climate information more accessible, even in resource-constrained institutions.
From digital guests to digital hosts
The expansion is supported by the AfricaConnect projects co-funded by the European Commission. Central is a new 10 Gbps link between Lagos and Cape Town, activated through the ZAOXI global exchange point, which directly connects WACREN with South Africa’s SANReN network, and, by extension, the wider UbuntuNet Alliance region. This marks the first time African regional research networks in the west, central, eastern, and southern regions can peer directly with each other, without routing traffic through Europe.
By keeping data on African routes, latency and costs are reduced, while reliability and collaboration opportunities are greatly enhanced.
“This is more than an infrastructure upgrade – it’s Africa asserting its place in the global research ecosystem. For too long, African researchers have been digital guests in their own continent. Today, we become hosts of our own scientific destiny,” says Dr. Eyouleki T. G. Palanga, CEO of WACREN.
Enabling advanced climate simulations
For higher education and research institutes in the newly connected countries that have long faced limited connectivity and prohibitive costs, the network now opens the door to real-time global collaboration. Students and researchers will gain access to international databases, digital libraries, virtual laboratories, and cloud computing resources, enabling them to participate more equitably alongside their peers worldwide.
The enhanced network will also power WACREN’s annual Women’s Hackathon, conducted in both French and English to unite participants from across Francophone and Anglophone Africa.
Building on its cloud infrastructure, WACREN plans to interconnect high-performance computing (HPC) systems across five countries in a federated infrastructure. This will enable researchers to run advanced simulations for water and energy resource modelling, climate adaptation, and other data-intensive domains. For example, to improve basin-wide modelling for hydroelectric power management in the Volta River Basin, while also providing a platform for collaborative research across borders.
The connection to ZAOXI will further enhance these efforts by linking WACREN’s federated HPC infrastructure with global and continental initiatives such as GEO and AfriGEO, positioning African researchers as active contributors to international climate science.
Source: the article “WACREN Connects Six New Countries and Sets Foundation for Climate Programme” at the WACREN website.
Contributors
