Since the inauguration of Digital Education Day in 2024, WACREN and the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) have collaborated closely to advance dialogue, practice, and partnerships on the future of digital education in Africa.

As Africa enters a new phase of digital transformation in higher education, WACREN and NOUN are now deepening this collaboration to advance the Africa Digital Campus (ADC) through a concrete, implementation-focused demonstrator.

This next phase builds on the Memorandum of Understanding signed between WACREN and NOUN, which formalises cooperation in digital infrastructure alignment, open knowledge, distributed learning, and capacity building.

From Convening to Demonstration

Digital Education Day has served as a shared platform for policy dialogue, community building, and strategic alignment since its inception in 2024. Building on this foundation, WACREN and NOUN will now move deliberately from convening to demonstration through a NOUN–WACREN Distributed Campus Demonstrator.

This initiative connects the principles of the Distributed University decentralised, equitable, and sustainable higher education with federated digital infrastructure developed under the Africa Digital Campus programme.

The demonstrator will show how learning, research, and scholarly publishing can be delivered through interconnected digital nodes, rather than relying solely on centralised physical campuses.

Priority Areas for 2026

In the coming year, collaboration will focus on four interconnected areas:

  1. Federated Digital Infrastructure
    Aligning NOUN’s digital systems and nationwide study centres with WACREN’s regional infrastructure, supported by NgREN connectivity and national service aggregation.
  2. Open Knowledge and Open Scholarship
    Strengthening repositories, open educational resources, and Diamond Open Access publishing workflows in line with LIBSENSE open science practices.
  3. Distributed Learning and Innovation
    Piloting digitally enabled teaching and learning models that reflect NOUN’s distributed structure while enabling cross-institutional and cross-border collaboration.
  4. Capacity Building and Replication
    Developing skills, governance models, and practical implementation guides that other African universities can adopt through the Africa Digital Campus.

Why This Matters for Africa

This collaboration directly advances Africa’s strategic priorities:

  • Digital sovereignty – African knowledge hosted, governed, and sustained on African infrastructure
  • Equity and inclusion – reduced geographic and institutional barriers to higher education
  • Sustainability – lower costs, duplication, and carbon footprint through shared digital services
  • Global visibility – African scholarship locally owned yet globally connected

Continuing the Journey

As Digital Education Day evolves from an annual convening into a platform for sustained action, WACREN and NOUN invite universities, policymakers, research networks, libraries, funders, and open science partners to engage with this next phase of the Africa Digital Campus.

Together, we aim to demonstrate that Africa’s digital future in higher education is distributed, open, resilient, and community-led, and that it is already being built.

Spotlight at the WACREN 2026 Conference in Banjul

The NOUN–WACREN Distributed Campus Demonstrator will be featured in a dedicated session at the WACREN 2026 Conference in Banjul as a regional implementation case for the Africa Digital Campus.

Using NOUN as a national-scale demonstrator, the session will present a replicable model for federated digital education, clarifying the complementary roles of NRENs, regional infrastructure, national service aggregation, and open-science frameworks. It will highlight early implementation insights across infrastructure alignment, governance, and distributed learning.

The session will engage NRENs, universities, policymakers, and development partners on adaptation, replication, and scaling across West and Central Africa, positioning the Africa Digital Campus as a practical pathway for digital sovereignty, open knowledge, and equitable higher education.

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