Impact case study database

Equitable access to education and research is vital to development in Africa and is a major priority for African Nations. For example, the African Union Agenda 2063’s Call to Action commits to speeding up actions to (c) “Catalyse education and skills revolution and actively promote science, technology, research and innovation…” This aligns with Sustainable Development Goal 4 (Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all). As noted by the World Bank, National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are a major factor in enabling this – as demonstrated in over 120 countries, NRENs organize centralised public university Internet access/connectivity, offer additional software, systems and services through common standards to enable worldwide scientific collaboration and digital educational resources, and, through economies of scale, drive down prices of these. In Africa emerging NRENs are having a major impact on public Universities (e.g. cutting Internet costs from GBP3,000 to GBP4,400 per megabit per second (Mbps) per month to under GBP73 per Mbps). However, African universities cannot realise the full benefit of these reduced costs without networked services supporting education and research. Taylor and Anagnostou have worked with emerging African NRENs to develop these services and to accelerate significantly their maturity. This has had a major knock-on effect to their user community, the staff and students of African universities. Taylor and Anagnostou have identified two main examples of impact.

(i) African Network Service Development. Network service deployment is extremely complex. For example, services supporting access and collaboration need a portfolio of services Authentication and Authorization Infrastructures (AAIs). These allow NRENs and their universities to establish trusted user identities and to authorise home institution access to internal networks and digital resources. Importantly, it allows home users to be authenticated at other partner NRENs and universities across the world (e.g. via eduroam). There are multiple complex routes to deployment (federated single sign-on, e.g. Shiboleth, eduGAIN, etc.) which required a highly skilled technical team. Taylor led consortia and worked with the RENs Ubuntunet Alliance and WACREN to investigate of the most effective route to service deployment of this and other associated services (e.g. Science Gateways) based on a novel e-Infrastructure Reference Architecture ( E1). From this, Taylor led the development of training materials delivered by the RENs to their NRENs. This work was adopted by both these associations as well as at least 6 NRENs (Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia) supporting approximately 160 Universities and 1,800,000 students ( E2). Our work was instrumental in initiating several NRENs including the Lagos State-based Eko-Konnect cluster of the Nigerian NREN (NgREN) that serves 176 Universities and around 2,000,000 students. ( E3). Taylor/Anagnostou also worked in the H2020 TANDEM project with WACREN to create a NREN Service Roadmap used to guide the development of NRENs in 11 African Nations in West Africa ( E4). These NRENs form a formal part of education policy in these countries – this work has therefore directly contributed to the educational policies of at least 17 African Nations ( E5).

(ii) The OECD, UNESCO and the World Bank have indicated the value and benefits of Open Science in developed economies (e.g. over a billion USD in 10 years in the USA, wider innovation in SMEs, citizen science, etc.) In developing economies further benefits are possible (e.g. access to African research outputs, access to research by research institutions, significantly reduced costs of data access/use, etc.) ( E6) With the Ubuntunet Alliance and WACREN, Anagnostou/Taylor used the FAIR Open Science Platform (OSP) (co-developed by Brunel and UNICT (Italy)) to demonstrate how Open Science could be adopted by NRENs and used to support their Universities. Again with UNICT, Anagnostou/Taylor ran several hackfests (2016/7) to jump start several African Open Science projects. This resulted in 35 scientists from 6 African countries developing 49 applications servicing 24 scientific communities (ranging from bioinformatics to healthcare). It also enabled several NRENs to begin to create Open Access Repositories (Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania and Uganda) that are servicing their scientific communities (e.g. this has enabled the Africa Centre of Excellence in Phytomedicine and Research Development (ACEPRD) at University of Jos (Nigeria) to create a repository of over 200 local plant species) ( E7). The most successful of these formed the basis of the National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia (NADRE - https://nadre.ethernet.edu.et//) with EthERNet (Ethiopia’s NREN). 47 public Universities are able to use this service to openly publish their work, data and theses. Academic end users benefit from this national NREN service (including many now using ORCIDs for the first time). This overcame the problems with maintaining institutional ones (around 10 repositories with only three working) ( E8, E9). In 2019 this led to the Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Higher Education mandating Open Science and the free access to all outputs from publicly-funded research.

The only report on the economic benefits of a NREN to its host nation (Canada) estimated an annual 5% increase in GDP through enhanced digital service provision and reduced Internet bandwidth costs for universities ( E10). These facilitated increased research productivity and higher numbers of highly qualified graduates entering the national economy. There is no recent data on graduates and their employment. However, as evidenced above, 3,800,000 students have received digitally enhanced education provided through digital educational platforms and services (access made possible through Brunel’s research) and have saved annually at least GBP81,700,000 in broadband costs ( E11). Finally, given that NRENs that Brunel has worked with are some of the most mature in Africa, if we estimate their effect on national economies to be 0.01% rather than 5% (limited by other factors such as high graduate unemployment ( E12)), then these NRENs and the services that Brunel researchers have enabled will have in 2019 contributed to an additional approximate GDP of GBP98,000,000 annually across Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia (Malawi is still developing) ( E13).