NADRE

Sci-GaIA (www.sci-gaia.eu) was an EU funded project that ran from May 2015 to April 2017. Initially set out to create sustainable training to support scientific endeavour through Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa, to better motivate an...

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Sci-GaIA (www.sci-gaia.eu) was an EU funded project that ran from May 2015 to April 2017. Initially set out to create sustainable training to support scientific endeavour through Science Gateways and e-Infrastructures in Africa, to better motivate and to establish a clearer route to impact, the project shifted focus to embrace Open Science to better open scientific achievements in Africa across the world. Overall, the Sci-GaIA project made thousands of people made aware of Science Gateways, e-Infrastructures and Open Science and has created a sustainable ecosystem of Open Science compliant, Open Innovation capable and Open Education based collaboration across Africa. It has also addressed several UN Sustainable Development Goals: (3) Good Health and Well-being, (4) Quality Education, (9) Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure, (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities, (13) Climate Action and (17) Partnerships for the Goals. Overall the project made effective impacts on African health and public health and, consequently, on the quality and duration of life. The major results of the project related to the theme of the session this abstract is proposed for were: - The creation of the Open Science Platform (www.sci-gaia.eu/osp), a DevOps-compliant public research e-Infrastructure (both Grid and Cloud Computing based) for projects and applications, which includes a Linked Open Data federation, a standard based Open Access Repository – also for Open Educational Resources – and an online platform for MOOCs. - The creation of more than 120 e-Infrastructure-related training and educational materials (www.sci-gaia.eu/materials/). - The creation and implementation of the e-Research Hackfest (www.sci-gaia.eu/summer-hackfest/) pedagogical model that uses effective challenge-driven education to train, innovate and create new services, applications and developers. - The creation of 35 Champions (www.sci-gaia.eu/champions/) who have has supported 24 Communities of Practice (www.sci-gaia.eu/community/), created 7 new Science Gateways (www.sci-gaia.eu/science-gateways/), multiple new services and 5 new Open Data Repositories. - A catalogue (www.sci-gaia.eu/service-catalogue/) of 19 new federated services and 30 new applications (www.sci-gaia.eu/applications/), which can also be used for education and training purposes. In this contribution we quickly summarise the Sci-GaIA results, share the lessons learnt and discuss the opportunities for the African Communities of Practices and Higher Education System to leverage and exploit project results. I do the latter presenting two examples I’m contributing to: the creation of the NADRE and the definition of new policy and strategic plans for effective ICT implementation in African Higher Education Systems. The National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia (NADRE) intends to provide researchers, lecturers, students and stakeholders from outside of the academic world access to research works published by Ethiopian universities and research institutions. All public and private universities as well as research institutions will contribute to the NADRE and will provide citizens access to it. The objective of the NADRE is threefold (see https://agenda.ethernet.edu.et/e/nadre-kom/): - To increase the access of academics and citizens in Ethiopia and worldwide to research works published by Ethiopian researchers at one of the Ethiopian universities or research institutions, - To foster the dissemination of research outcomes and make them, as well as their authors, more visible inside and outside the country, and - To spread completed research to other corners of the country in order to allow other researchers to build on it. For the time being, the NADRE will mainly include Master theses, dissertations, journals, articles, conference proceedings as well as all works published by researchers from Ethiopian universities and research institutions as well as from Ethiopian researchers living abroad. All artefacts will be published under Creative Commons licenses and will be tagged with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). In the next few years, African Higher Education & Research System must face and win the unprecedented challenge of re-inventing its mission(s) to create tomorrow’s workers that can fully tap on ICT to find better jobs and improve the quality of their own lives as well as those of their families. Universities should not anymore be only responsible for qualifying the human capital (Education – the “First Mission”) and for producing new knowledge (Research – the “Second Mission”) but they must also engage with societal needs and market demands by linking their activity with their own socio-economic context- the “Third Mission”. The contribution of Higher Education to jobs and growth, and its international attractiveness, should be enhanced through close, effective links between education, research, and innovation – the three sides of the so-called “knowledge triangle”, which is deemed to be the real “engine” of a knowledge society. For all the above, it is my strong conviction that the policy and strategic plans for ICT effective ICT implementation in Africa Higher Education should be aligned to the goal of creating next generation of ICT-conversant people that could improve the quality of the African societies, their digital literacy degree and the continent as a whole. Policies and plans should be framed within the larger design of an Open Science commons, which will sensibly improve higher education, research and innovation on the same foot across Africa. The main goals of carrying out a pervasive implementation of ICTs in the African Higher Education System should be: (i) to promote easy access to ICT resources such as teaching/learning materials, simulation and demonstration tools, scientific publications, and scientific computing power to both the educators and students; (ii) to build an infrastructure that will pool the limited and scattered ICT expertise in the continent into a common platform so as to promote local and international collaboration; (iii) to make African researchers and educators, as well as their scientific and educational products, more visible worldwide so to enhance the attractiveness of African universities and create better curricula that could help reduce the brain drain and contribute to open innovation; (iv) to increase reputation, in order to attract resources to the continent. The presentation has been given in the Session "African Universities Response to the Challenges of the Data Revolution" of SciDataCon-IDW2018 Conference held in Gaborone (Botswana) on November 5-8, 2018.

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Ethiopian Universities records are free of century old academic traditions and therefore able to adjust to trends without giving up academic behaviour or tradition. The volume of university libraries will linger on as the measure of the academic perf...

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Ethiopian Universities records are free of century old academic traditions and therefore able to adjust to trends without giving up academic behaviour or tradition. The volume of university libraries will linger on as the measure of the academic performance of universities. This allows Ethiopian universities to leapfrog and enter the digital era and to gain digital presence in line with the top ranked universities - without having special academic honours. The digital era equalises traditional and young universities. Both have to learn to find their identities and ways in the digital space. As many academically well acknowledged universities demonstrate that tradition is often rather a burden than an advantage in the digital space. Therefore, Ethiopian universities are encouraged by politicians and the international research community to position themselves along with well ranked universities. The prerequisite lays in the state-of-art infrastructure and lecturers’ credentials to become digital literate in order to pass it further to counter parts and students. Digital literacy redefines literacy skills as well as academic work and tradition. However, good training resources for researchers looking to develop these skills are scarce and it is difficult to determine where to start. Training in data and computing skills is still largely absent from researcher in their undergraduate and graduate programs. Hence, a series of workshops to the topic “increase digital literacy for the researchers” had been delivered for young Ethiopian researchers. More than 400 researchers and librarians have been trained in The Carpentries. More than 23 participants from 23 Ethiopian Universities and 3 international participants of H3ABioNet which is a Pan African Bioinformatics network from Sudan, Kenya and Uganda have attended a train-the-trainer workshop in Addis Ababa in order to build a network and to add more instructors in to the ecosystem. In view of sustainability, the Ethiopian Carpentry team has developed different activities as post-workshop activities. The Ethiopian Carpentry Team considers coding as a craftsmanship and stresses in line with this approach: practice makes perfect. Additional incentives such as R-competition titled as “Code the Future” of R-Hackfests prepare are conceptualised and open for trainees to excel in their coding skills. R-Ladies as sister organisations at several campuses from R-Ladies Addis Ababa have been set up as local umbrella organisations, which offer Carpentry workshops and coordinate the calls for participations in the R-competition and R-Hackfest. The question is, how do these activities reach out to the academic community. The methodology applied in this research will present the different post-workshop activities. A survey will bring light on the activities and their outreach to the academic community. Questionnaires will be developed and sent out to workshop organisers to collect answers from previous Carpentry Workshop participants on one side and to librarians on the other side. Trainers will be interviewed. The questionnaires will cover the Carpentry workshops experiences in part one. Part two will focus on an applied approach with some tests. The results will be captured and coded for further use. The analysis of the findings will be presented as the mirror of the post-workshop activities offered. The discussion will refer to the findings and will discuss the revealed short-comings and what could be done to overcome those. Suggestions will be collected from the Ethiopian Carpentry Team and will be brought to a focus group for further discussion and analysis. Jointly, best practices will be elaborated and will be taken as a benchmark on which an evaluation and monitoring system will be built together with a management information system. Respective indicators will be developed to measure the performance of instructors and participants. The outcome from the survey will be compared with the pre- workshop and post-workshop Carpentry surveys conducted online in Ethiopia by The Carpentry. It will be the task of this research to find answers of the variations. The post-workshop activities performance will be explained in that light. The proposal will contribute significantly towards SciDataCon and International Data Week programme. The proposal would include statistics of by politicians encouragement and the international research community to rank themselves and universities.

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