Keypoints:
- Six nations join WACREN high-speed network
- Lagos–Cape Town link cuts costs and latency
- New HPC and climate data projects planned
THE West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) has dramatically expanded its high-speed, low-latency backbone, bringing The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and Senegal into the fold. Supported by the AfricaConnect projects and co-funded by the European Commission, this upgrade marks a turning point for higher education and research communities across the region.
For universities and research institutes that have long struggled with limited connectivity and prohibitive costs, the network now opens doors to real-time global collaboration. Students and researchers can access international databases, digital libraries, virtual laboratories and cloud resources, enabling them to work alongside global peers on an equal footing.
Peering across the continent
A central feature of the project is a new 10 Gbps link between Lagos and Cape Town, activated through the ZAOXI Global Exchange Point. This connection links WACREN directly with South Africa’s SANReN network and the wider UbuntuNet Alliance region. For the first time, African regional research networks in the west, central, eastern and southern corridors can peer directly with each other without routing traffic through Europe.
By keeping data within Africa, the upgrade lowers latency and costs while improving reliability and collaboration opportunities.
‘This is more than an infrastructure upgrade – it’s Africa asserting its place in the global research ecosystem,’ said Dr Eyouleki T.G. Palanga, WACREN’s chief executive. ‘For too long, African researchers have been digital guests in their own continent. Today, we become hosts of our own scientific destiny.’
Driving climate innovation
WACREN plans to leverage its new reach to accelerate climate initiatives. It will deploy WMO-compliant weather stations integrated with LoRaWAN IoT gateways, expanding pilots already running in Ghana and Nigeria. These will form the backbone of a regional climate monitoring platform, delivering real-time data to support local adaptation strategies.
A new data portal will provide African researchers and national meteorological agencies with terrestrial data streams from EUMETSAT. By combining these with observations from local IoT stations, the portal will make critical climate information more accessible, even for institutions with limited resources.
The enhanced network will also power WACREN’s annual Women’s Hackathon, held in French and English to unite innovators across Francophone and Anglophone Africa. Improved bandwidth will enable participants to develop green technologies and digital climate solutions, including real-time modelling and data visualisation.
Federated computing for big science
Building on its GPU-enabled cloud infrastructure, WACREN plans to interconnect high-performance computing (HPC) systems across five countries in a federated network. This will allow researchers to run advanced simulations for water and energy resource modelling, climate adaptation and other data-intensive work. For example, basin-wide modelling for hydroelectric power management in the Volta River Basin will gain speed and precision, while fostering cross-border research collaborations.
The ZAOXI connection will further enhance these efforts by linking WACREN’s HPC resources with global initiatives such as GEO and AfriGEO, positioning African researchers as active contributors to international climate science.
Stronger networks, stronger science
With six new countries joining its backbone and the Lagos–Cape Town interconnection live, WACREN has laid the groundwork for a federated digital infrastructure that connects people, data and computing power across borders.
By combining high-speed connectivity, real-time climate monitoring and federated HPC, WACREN is enabling African researchers, students and innovators to shift from isolated projects to continent-wide solutions—building the capacity to shape Africa’s own scientific destiny and contribute directly to global knowledge.
