COVID19 in focus

  Find out what GÉANT and the African National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are doing to support research and education during the COVID-19 pandemic, confirming their place at the heart of R&E networking.

The African RRENs’ response to COVID19 in a nutshell:

North Africa
  • The Ministry of Education in Morocco launched an e-learning portal, Morocco eLPortal, hosted by the MARWAN network.
  • ARN is interested in deploying locally a branch of openUp2U in Algeria.
  • EUN has coordinated with IT vendors to support university services in Egypt.
  • CCK has set up a Jitsi-based videoconferencing tool for online classes in Tunisian universities as well as a VPN-SSL service for easy access to scientific resources for the academic community.
East and Southern Africa
  • ZAMREN installed Moodle offering free hosting for 22 member institutions in Zambia.
  • Ongoing discussions with telecoms operators about zero ratings for educational websites.
  • Ongoing discussions and technical tests for UA to host BigBlueButton to support NRENs and universities interested in online teaching and e-learning.
  • UA jointly hosted a VC meeting with the World Bank, “NRENs as Life-Savers for University during COVID-19”, on best responses, challenges and opportunities during the pandemic.
  • In Kenya, KENET is offering a discounted data bundle to university students.
  • In Mozambique, MoRENet has requested a capacity upgrade to access UbuntuNet network.
  • The Uganda Christian University and the Catholic University of Malawi have successfully migrated to e-learning, online exams and communications with students.
  • RENU has expressed interest in deploying locally an openUp2U branch in Uganda. It also introduced zero-rated mobile access for students and staff of RENU member institutions.
West and Central Africa
  • WACREN offered its members a licensed use on its Zoom service until the end of 2020 to support their need for online collaboration tools.
  • In Ghana, GARNET is conducting tests to support e-learning via a pilot eduID Ghana federation now involving providers from 12 institutions.
  • WACREN is organising online training activities, such as online capacity building workshops in substitution to the cancelled WACREN 2020 conference and the LIBSENSE online workshop on open scholarly communication infrastructure.
  • WACREN has been supporting the COVID-19 Smart Development Hack by gathering implementation proposals on an Open Science platform in response to the pandemic.
  • In Sierra Leone, SLREN is helping HLIs to leverage existing commercial internet access to online e-resources websites and provide zero rating of universities URLs.
Read the articles in this section for more detailed information on the African response to the COVID-19. These articles were produced with the financial support of the European Union. Their contents do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union