The Project

Bandwidth Optimization for African Universities (BOAU) aims for widespread improvement in how African research and education institutions manage their Internet bandwidth. Because African universities spend up to 100 times more for access compared to their counterparts in industrialized countries, these institutions have far less access to ICTs and online research resources. To begin to close this “digital divide,” the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) is delivering a series of capacity-building workshops on bandwidth management, as well as developing and publishing freely available training resources on bandwidth management.

 

The Development Goals
The project’s chief objective is to help African universities better understand the bandwidth problem and implement strategies for more effective use of current Internet resources. Collaboration with training and Internet experts from a range of organizations helped create high-quality training materials that can be applied to local environments. The knowledge transfer that results could significantly improve bandwidth management and efficiency among several key groups: executive management, senior management, information intermediaries, and IT staff. The end result of this capacity-building will be faster, cheaper access for researchers and better information for university managers to negotiate effectively with bandwidth providers.

 

The Context
In the developed world, most university students couldn’t imagine conducting a research project without using the Internet to supplement material from the university library. In Africa, most universities have extremely limited library resources, making the Internet even more critical to research, and to higher education generally. Yet the exorbitant cost of bandwidth severely limits the amount of bandwidth available to researchers. Worse still, abuse and inefficient use of bandwidth limit even further what is available to researchers. Although Internet access is critical for research and education, most African universities lack the expertise to cope with extremely bandwidth-intensive spam, viruses, Internet-based email and online “chat” services.

 

Although more effective bandwidth use resulting from this project cannot be accurately gauged in the short term, tools that measure the optimization of bandwidth will be deployed in the evaluation phase. These tools will help determine whether trained staff are implementing what they have learned and how implementation can become more effective. Ultimately, BOAU will help improve African research and higher education by giving universities much better access to Internet research resources, and by enabling research collaboration and information sharing. BOAU training materials will be freely available to any interested university, research institution, or NGO.