Its about time Africa got connected with the rest of the world!!!

Those of you that know me a little better know that I have been a big advocate of professional academic research on the African continent. At the BarCamp Diaspora 2009, this was a whole session topic that filled a large conference room. What we all wondered was what was shielding African institutions from producing standard research that paralleled with the rest of the academic world. Why weren’t they exposed to the volumes of research that had already been done here in the West and why was a particular professor’s research rejected every year by a scientific journal because it failed to comply with the standards in the field of study? Well, maybe the answer has to do with Africa’s connections with everyone else. AllAfrica.com has reported a high-speed fibre optic network that JUST connected national laboratories and institutes across Canada, China, Korea, the Netherlands, Russia and the United States to Egypt. Just Egypt though, not really all of Africa.
The Global Ring Network for Advanced Applications Development (GLORIAD) that enables international scientific collaborations started as MIRnet, a network between the United States and Russia, in 1998. And Egypt, India, Singapore and Vietnam just got added this year. Hmm, I’m not sure what caused the delay but Egyptian universities have already begun planning projects to start utilizing the network and it sounds like the next plan of action is the continue spreading this network to include the entire continent and the Middle East. Of course the NSF-funded expansion will have to start fund-raising efforts first before that happens so who knows how long that will take. We will keep an eye on this effort and hope the twelve-year wait Egypt, India, Singapore and Vietnam endured will be cut a bit shorter.