WACREN and the French Research Institute for Development (IRD) are jointly working to implement the pilot phase of the EU-funded Africa Digital Campus project in two countries in the WACREN region. Africa Digital Campus (ADC) is a project intended to create an opportunity for beneficiary countries to be resilient to the negative impact COVID-19 had on their education content delivery. So, ADC will help reinforce continuity and quality of education services by supporting the development of digital infrastructure and content delivery. And this will start with pilots in the sea-facing Bénin and landlocked Burkina Faso over the next two years, on a three million Euros budget. Between these two countries, over 10,000 students and researchers are expected to benefit from the pilot project. The NRENs in the two countries – RBER (Bénin) and FasoREN (Burkina Faso) are earmarked to anchor the pilot with infrastructure and structured digital services. ADC has been structured in a way to help countries to sustain and scale the infrastructure and services after the pilot. At the end of the day, ADC would have helped beneficiaries to create a national digital learning environment with banks of sharable courses including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data science.
