South Africa's minister of science and technology Naledi Pandor has confirmed the contribution and participation of several technology companies, including Cisco, Intel and IBM, in the Africa Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Project.
The Minister spoke of partnerships that have emerged from within the public and private sectors, and that the Project has the buy-in of the broader ICT sector.
Technology, including still-to-be designed Aperture Arrays, have been earmarked for inclusion in the overall project - designed to construct and sustain the largest and most sensitive radio astronomy telescope.
As project directors explained, the telescope is really a number of small dishes connected via optical fibre that receive data and transmit signals to a correlator. This is the first stage of computing, after which data is processed through a high performance computer and sent to scientists for analysis.
At the 2nd Ministerial Meeting of the SKA African Partner Countries, hosted in Pretoria on 25 March 2015, officials and other stakeholders outlined the importance of SKA, as well as the African Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network (AVN) Project, to building the continent's science and radio astronomy capacity.
Although the Minister acknowledged that progress on the AVN has been slower than expected and there was a need "to up their game", several steps have been taken that signal advances on collaboration between member countries on the Africa SKA Project.
In addition to the SKA project having entered pre-construction phase, a draft MoU and timeline for the AVN development and SKA hosting has also been signed.
SKA Africa is "an excellent vehicle for human capital development, as well as for innovation key technologies as the ICT sector, and most notably for the big data economy," said Minister Pandor.
Contribution to Africa's scientific research processing and analysis skills, and human capital development was raised as key socio-economic spin-offs of the Project.
"In South Africa, government's contribution to human capital development includes bursaries for undergraduate and postgraduate studies, and the funding of research chairs, including five in the area of radio astronomy. These positions have attracted some of the world's leading astronomers to South Africa. Since 2006 we have spent a total of over R29 million on bursaries in engineering, astrophysics and astronomy for students from our African partner countries.
"The recent 1st African Higher Education Summit, held in Senegal under the theme "Revitalising higher education for Africa's future", confirmed the need to create a continental strategy to transform the African higher education sector, and focus on the establishment of high-level, cutting-edge research," the Minister added.
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