Beyond connectivity: Making African scholarship visible

In February, Malawi-based UbuntuNet Alliance, an Eastern and Southern African research and educational networking organisation, appointed Kenyan national, Professor Madara Ogot, as its new chief executive.

Ogot is an accomplished academic with extensive experience spanning more than 30 years in various fields, including administration, planning, finance and teaching. He takes the helm at the alliance at a time when the region’s higher education is plagued by massive challenges – among them connectivity, funding shortages, infrastructure deficits as well as the devastating effects of COVID-19.

University World News spoke to Ogot and asked him how the challenges confronting research and higher education in the region can be overcome – and how the alliance can assist.

UWN: The higher education and research sectors in Africa are behind in internet connectivity compared with global research and education networks. What is UbuntuNet doing to help?

MO: Our primary role is providing affordable low-cost broadband connectivity indirectly to universities. Most countries have what is called a national research and education network (NREN). We focus on Eastern and Southern Africa but there are similar organisations like us in West and North Africa.

In Eastern and Southern Africa, the NRENs directly connect universities, research institutions and libraries with broadband connectivity and then we connect them to each other, and other global research and education networks, and to the global internet – at high speed and relatively low cost.

Why is this important? COVID-19 was a perfect example to illustrate the need for connectivity. Today, we get most of our information online, and we communicate with each other online. Educators and researchers use the internet substantially more than the average person because we move around large amounts of data.

For the basic work that we do, if we were to do it using regular commercial internet connections, most universities could not afford it. Because we have connected ourselves through our own dedicated networks, and the Ubuntu network connects them to the rest of the world, we are able to move high volumes of data to each other at reasonable cost.

This enables educators who want to access educational resources and researchers who want to work together to be able to carry out their work in an affordable manner.

In our region, there are 26 countries and we have only connected 14, so we still have a way to go. This year, we are adding Ethiopia and Botswana.

UWN: Beyond facilitating connectivity, what else does the alliance do?

MO: It’s fantastic to have a network but, nowadays, we view the network as the minimum standard.

The question now becomes: what are you going to do with a network other than just accessing other people’s resources?

Our focus, therefore – in as much as we continue to expand, upgrade and maintain our network – is to start to look at other platforms that will ride on our network such that the continent becomes a generator of information and data and not primarily a user of information and data.

Currently, our network analysis shows that we have more data coming in from global networks than data going out, which means not a lot of our data is being used. It is not as if it’s not there. Our scientists are working, but part of the problem is that their data is not openly and readily available to the extent that it is available in other parts of the world.

So, one of our current initiatives, Moving Beyond the Network, aims to encourage our researchers to embrace open science and we are in the process of establishing a continental open science data and information depository.

The goal behind establishing an open science depository is that we will end up with a rich set of information that scientists across the world can use, but it is data that is generated and owned by researchers on the continent.

So that is one of the big projects we have been tasked to do. It was delayed by COVID-19 but procurements and other processes are under way and we hope that, by November, we will be up and running.

And the goal now is to encourage researchers, educators and governments who will be doing this at scale to be able to freely deposit their published and unpublished work which can then be readily and freely available to researchers primarily across the continent and on a secondary basis to researchers across the world.

This makes the continent more visible. People always argue that not much work is done being on the continent and that’s not true. A lot of work is being done; it’s just not visible. We are trying to change that by setting up the African Open Science Platform and we are doing it in collaboration with our two sister organisations in West and North Africa.

UWN: What other projects of interest are you working on?

MO: During COVID-19, when schools and universities were closed, everyone was scrambling to look for electronic educational material because no one was in the classroom. Most of that content was developed outside Africa.

Other than South Africa and some North African countries, most universities on the continent have very few textbooks. For students, the available books are very expensive because they are not authored locally. Lecturers can write books and students can have access to learning material but the challenge is that local publishers are not interested because there are no incentives to publish local books.

So, our goal is to meet everybody halfway and shift the paradigm completely on publishing for universities on the continent.

As the alliance, we are setting up a platform similar to Amazon’s Kindle platform. We will work with faculty on the continent to support them to write textbooks for our universities. The textbooks will be hosted on the platform and made available to students and staff across the continent, increasing the quality of teaching and learning while simultaneously supporting scholarship.

Our proposal is that we will pay the authors upfront through assistance from foundations, development partners and friends. We use the Kindle-like set-up to make the book available to all students across Africa. Students do not have to pay, so we remove that affordability barrier. The author will write because we have paid their royalties upfront. We are trying to be in a position, ambitious as it is, that, from 2023, we are able to publish 100 books a year at university level.

This way, we will have a large array of relevant continentally authored books freely available to students across the continent and this, in our view, will significantly improve teaching and learning because students will no longer have to simply rely on the lecturer.

UWN: Research in Africa faces a lot of challenges; how can productivity be improved?

MO: I would argue that our number one problem for research productivity in Africa is money and I don’t mean availability of money. There is a lot of money but not availability of African money. We did a study in Kenya three years ago and found that virtually all research projects in African universities that were funded were foreign-funded.

Apart from North Africa and South Africa, everything in-between … there is funding, yes, but it is very little. That is a fundamental problem.

The second is publications: we don’t have journals. Most Africans who want a contextual journal publication will ship their papers to South Africa or North Africa because that is where the journals are. In-between, there is nothing. So how can we can talk about research on the continent when the majority of the countries do not fund the research and do not publish the research?