Africa

High bandwidth and seamless access to local and global data is key to effective soil observation and resource mapping. Dr Lydia Chabala from the University of Zambia explains how ZAMREN is bringing her research to the next level, thus enabling her and fellow scientists to provide input to sustainable land management policies.

African scientists have begun to study genomic influences on disease across their continent, and the Pan African bioinformatics network H3ABioNet supports much of their research, using videoconferencing to bring researchers together across vast distances.

The Research and Education Network for Uganda is helping one of the country's universities, the Ugandan Christian University offer PhD and Master of Journalism and Media Studies Progammes online in collaboration with the University of Kwazulu Natal in South Africa and the NLA University College in Norway.

As research becomes increasingly data-intensive, researchers have to sharpen their data management skills. The Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA) lends a helping hand, by providing an online Data Management Planning tool, for sound collection, management, accessibility and preservation of research data.

Moroccan and French researchers are using high-speed networks to combine their expertise in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing to produce new thematic maps of Agadir, Morocco and to monitor this fragile landscape.

90% of the world’s 50 million epilepsy sufferers live in developing countries and a large minority need surgery as the only effective treatment. Thanks to the power of high-capacity R&E networks, the outlook for millions of epilepsy sufferers is being dramatically transformed and the costs of treatment substantially reduced.

Collaborations for Dengue Fever and Chikungunya initiatives are excellent examples of the scalable nature of efforts to build communities. As such, the tools and capabilities are easily adaptable to the plethora of infectious diseases that pose a global challenge.

The scale of the SKA represents a huge leap forward in engineering, telescope design and research & development towards building and delivering a unique instrument.