UNESCO-HP Brain Gain Initiative is out to initiate brain gain network for African academics, researchers and highly skilled experts in the diaspora with those in the continent.
The Brain Gain project managers, Marc Bellon and Liliana Simionescu, say they are witnessing very interesting developments in Africa enabled by a blend of global and local factors: the growing importance of collaboration in research activities, the development of communication tools that lower barriers to collaborate across borders and continents, and a state-of-the-art network from fiber cable connectivity.
The managers aims to capitalize on internet connectivity to support higher education institutions to develop their research capacity to improve research cooperation on practical and locally relevant issues.
The initiative operates as a partnership between UNESCO and Hewlett-Packard with higher education and research institutions throughout Africa and the Arab states. “Technology has a key role to play, with a strong emphasis placed on distributed/grid computing as a means of pooling resources, encouraging cooperation and diminishing geographical distances within and beyond Africa.”
The higher education experts say joining the initiative involves a few straightforward steps, out to foster ownership and sustainability. “Candidate institutions are first nominated by the ministry responsible for higher education. They are then invited to make a proposal for a research or training project addressing their interests and local priorities, which will be implemented jointly with expatriates, academics and researchers. Projects are selected through a competitive process,” Bellon and Liliana say.
They further explain: Those in the current phase cover a broad range of topics, including environment (climate change, hydrology, pollution, real-time monitoring and alert systems), biology, databases, image processing, medical research, nanotechnology, physics, e-learning and computer science.
Bellon and Liliana say: All participants benefit from IT equipment grants and from operational funds to help them to implement their project. They also take part in training sessions and are presented with networking opportunities. The equipment grant (which covers servers and workstations) and training and operational funds allow participants to modernize their infrastructure, familiarize themselves with grid computing and conduct a research project where this knowledge is immediately applied.
Networking opportunities foster interactions with experts in the region and beyond and make possible effective research collaboration independent of geographical location. “Networking should also enable a core group of experts to act as champions of the initiative to establish an African e-infrastructure and raise awareness of this among national policy- and decision-makers,” the assistant programme specialists in the division of higher education at UNESCO, Paris, says.
Since the hard work is always conducted at the institutional level,UNESCO-HP initiators says the demand for better infrastructure is there, the fruits of cooperation with expatriates are within reach, and the fibre-optic cables are coming now. Academics and researchers should be prepared, ready to leverage the new opportunities when their institutions come to enjoy reliable, affordable, abundant bandwidth.
While the Brain Gain Initiative focuses on content, high-speed networks is challenge to solved. The managers argue that it is a challenge to operate sensitive equipment and services under difficult conditions. Energy infrastructure issues, in particular, will not be solved overnight in Africa and Kenya in particular, as the current phase of the project comes to an end in early 2012.
Another challenge is training. Academics and researchers are often not familiar with grid computing and it is extremely valuable to provide them with as many opportunities as possible to have experience of it, UNESCO education experts say.
Adding: A few weeks ago, delegates from all participating institutions took part in an advanced training session, jointly organized by the initiative where they discussed their achievements and the challenges they are facing - opportunities were seized to forge new partnerships.
They say encouraging reports are already coming in that augur well for the future well-being of participant projects: a few of them which are at a more advanced stage of implementation are already extending support to their colleagues abroad.
Together with research cooperation with African expatriate academics in North America and Europe, we are witnessing the birth of new research partnerships, involving institutions based in several regions of Africa and the Arab States, Bellon and Liliana say.
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