Expanding the WACREN Backbone The historic expansion brings The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, and Senegal into WACREN’s high-speed, low-latency network, joining six other countries. Supported by the AfricaConnect projects co-funded by the European Commission, this advancement represents a turning point for higher education and research communities in the region. For higher education and research institutes in the newly connected countries that have long faced limited connectivity and prohibitive costs, the network now opens the door to real-time global collaboration. Students and researchers will gain access to international databases, digital libraries, virtual laboratories, and cloud computing resources, enabling them to participate more equitably alongside their peers worldwide. Peering Across Africa Central to this expansion is a new 10Gbps link between Lagos and Cape Town, activated through the ZAOXI Global Exchange Point, which directly connects WACREN with South Africa’s SANReN network and, by extension, the wider UbuntuNet Alliance region. This marks the first time African regional research networks in the west, central, eastern, and southern regions can peer directly with each other, without routing traffic through Europe. By keeping data on African routes, latency and costs are reduced, while reliability and collaboration opportunities are greatly enhanced. “This is more than an infrastructure upgrade – it’s Africa asserting its place in the global research ecosystem. For too long, African researchers have been digital guests in their own continent. Today, we become hosts of our own scientific destiny,” said Dr Eyouleki T.G. Palanga, CEO of WACREN. Driving Climate Innovation WACREN plans to leverage this expanded connectivity to advance its ambitious climate agenda. The organisation will deploy WMO-compliant weather stations integrated with LoRaWAN IoT gateways, building on the success of pilots in Ghana and Nigeria. These will form the backbone of a regional climate monitoring platform, providing real-time data to support local adaptation strategies across several countries. In parallel, WACREN will launch a data portal, giving African researchers and national meteorological agencies access to terrestrial data streams from EUMETSAT. By combining observations with data from local IoT weather stations, the portal will make critical weather and climate information more accessible, even in resource-constrained institutions. The enhanced network will also power WACREN’s annual Women’s Hackathon, conducted in both French and English to unite participants from across Francophone and Anglophone Africa. Through improved bandwidth, women innovators will collaborate on developing green technologies and digital climate solutions, including real-time modelling and data visualisation. Building on its GPU-enabled cloud infrastructure, WACREN now plans to interconnect high-performance computing (HPC) systems across five countries in a federated infrastructure. This will enable researchers to run advanced simulations for water and energy resource modelling, climate adaptation, and other data-intensive domains. For example, to improve basin-wide modelling for hydroelectric power management in the Volta River Basin, while also providing a platform for collaborative research across borders. The connection to ZAOXI will further enhance these efforts by linking WACREN’s federated HPC infrastructure with global and continental initiatives such as GEO and AfriGEO, positioning African researchers as active contributors to international climate science. Final Thought With six new countries joining its backbone and the Lagos–Cape Town interconnection now live, WACREN has set the stage not just for stronger networks, but for stronger science. This expansion is more than fibre and capacity; it is the foundation for a federated digital infrastructure that connects people, data, and computing power across borders. By combining high-speed connectivity, real-time climate monitoring, and a federated HPC infrastructure spanning multiple countries, WACREN is enabling African researchers, students, and innovators to move from isolated projects to collaborative, continent-wide solutions. In doing so, Africa is building the capacity to shape its own scientific destiny and contribute more directly to global knowledge. —– WACREN will launch the network expansion as a side-event at the Africa Internet Summit (2025) in Accra on Wednesday, October 1, 2025. Here is the link to the details – https://indico.wacren.net/event/249/ Watch the livestream here – https://video.wacren.net/media/0_byxbmh7f FacebookXLinkedInWhatsAppEmail
