Senegalese First to Benefit From UN Project to Reduce Africa’s Brain Drain
Scientists at a Senegalese university are the first to benefit from a United Nations-backed project aimed at providing
colleges in five African countries with the technology and tools needed to prevent the migration of graduates and reduce
the continent’s “brain drain.”
The installation of the first computing grid at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar is part of a joint initiative by
the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Hewlett-Packard and the Grid Computing Institute of
France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
Grid computing is a hardware and software infrastructure that clusters and integrates high-end computer networks,
databases and scientific instruments from multiple sources to form a virtual environment in which users can work
collaboratively.
Connected over the Internet, these sets of servers or computers make it possible to process and store data and to
multiply computing power and speed.
The University’s grid node, set up by the Grid Computing Institute of the CNRS, is the first sub-Saharan African
component of the grid infrastructure created in 2004 by the European Union.
“Launching this first link represents an important step in bridging the digital divide between North and South,” UNESCO said in a news release.
“It will facilitate international scientific cooperation for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole and for Senegal in
particular. Thanks to this link, scientists at the University now have access to considerable information technology
resources,” the agency added.
The joint project “Reversing Brain Drain into Brain Gain for Africa” follows the successful implementation of a similar
UNESCO/Hewlett-Packard initiative for Southeast Europe, launched in 2003.
That effort helped create websites, databases and new research projects in several universities in the region. Four
universities have become entirely self-sustainable in the use of grid technology and the project continues in three
others.
ENDS