Procurement is being conducted in Eastern and Southern Africa to connect additional countries to the AfricaConnect2 project and a tender for connectivity and equipment in West and Central Africa will be launched soon, says Manuella Abram of the research and education networking group GEANT.

Launched in December 2015, the €26.6m Africa and EU AfricaConnect2 internet project follows the success of the AfricaConnect project which contributed to the creation of the UbuntuNet – the high-speed network for research and education in Eastern and Southern Africa – between 2011 and 2015.

"In North Africa, Algeria upgraded its connectivity to Europe from 622Mbps to 2.5Gbps recently and a tender is underway to connect Tunisia to the regional ASREN network," Abram added via email. "The AfricaConnect2 project contract was signed by all partners EU, UbuntuNet Alliance, WACREN, ASREN and GEANT at the end of last year, but work had already started since June 2015. So AfricaConnect2 is well under way."

Upon completion, the project will offer seamless opportunities for African higher education institutions and research centres and create a gateway for pan-African and international collaboration.

"AfricaConnect2 will also allow researchers and academics to share big data and advance their research work benefiting from critical online resources: regional climate models and instant weather data to study climate change for example, a reliable internet connection to perform the genomic sequence data analysis to study new germs and viruses, science grids to compare results, the examples abound. A reliable high-speed internet connection is key to scientific research today and AfricaConnect2 simply aims to support scientific breakthroughs in Africa and for the sake of global science as well. The key to several current challenges (climate change, food security, water management) lies in Africa. Allowing African researchers to collaborate with their peers from around the world will enable them to solve the challenges we all face," said Abram.

Free WiFi

The project will also provide the connectivity needed to support several services and applications including Eduroam, a free wifi service that allows users (researchers, teachers, students, staff) from participating institutions to access the Internet from any Eduroam-enabled institution for their communication and research needs.

"We envisage a wide expansion of Eduroam throughout Africa and indeed globally. Identity federation and Eduroam are the first value-added services that dedicated research and education networks have been deploying in Europe and other parts of the world since their creation. We have witnessed in Europe that it also contributes to empower local networks and educational institutions in the fact that end users immediately see the benefit of it, thus attracting more members. Africa is next on the map. With high-speed reliable connectivity provided by national research and education networks, we naturally expect Eduroam to be widely available across Africa in the next few years," she said.

Africa has the least number of internet users compared to the rest of the world. According to Internet World statistics (2011), less than 6% of Africa's over a billion population have access to the internet though this would have changed going by the Internet Society's claim that the Internet in Africa is growing fast at a penetration level of about 20% (2015).