This paper was inspired by a recent assignment to support the provision of high speed and affordable connectivity for educational institutions in a southern African country. The assignment resulted in a proposal to establish a dedicated educational Internet Service Provider (ISP) for all educational institutions at all levels (universities, teaching training colleges, schools, libraries, museums and research institutes) building on an already existing innovative and functional ISP for primary and secondary schools and a framework to provide connectivity for social and economic development sectors. In many respects, such an educational ISP is akin to a National Research and Education Network (NREN). In the course of the assignment, I undertook extensive research on existing NRENs, their meaning, nature, growth and sustenance. I have coupled this research with my own experiences and reflections on NREN development in Africa to produce this paper. The paper is meant to share some of my findings and reflections to inform current efforts to create NRENs elsewhere in Africa.

The paper is divided into 4 sections:

Section 1- In the first part of the paper, I have reviewed existing NRENs and NREN initiatives in North America, Europe, Australia and Africa to understand what NRENs are, their origins (sometimes a little history is instructive), what drives their creation, what they do, who they benefit and why they are important.

Section 2- In the second part of the paper, I distil the lessons learned from the first section, various research reports and my own experiences to arrive at a number of “considerations” meant to inform nascent as well as existing NREN development efforts in Africa. Such considerations include a) a clear understanding of physical network architecture (included is a detailed discussion of national infrastructural issues), b) Ownership models for the NREN infrastructure, and c) the effect of size of country and number of institutions therein or what I collectively term “scale,”

Section 3- In this section, I consider the issues involved with starting up, managing, governing, operating and staffing NRENs as well as the financing and funding issues.

Section 4- The paper concludes by discussing what existing NRENs can do to better serve their members and making a number of proposals to advance NREN development and expansion efforts in Africa. These proposals are meant to build onto, accelerate and complementing current efforts underway.

I hope that this paper will stimulate further discussion and thinking in the African NREN development arena.