Trans African Network Development

3 February 2015. The Horizon2020 infrastructure support project TANDEM (TransAfrican Network Development) has successfully completed the evaluation stage.

The TANDEM project aims to create favorable conditions for WACREN (West and Central African Research and Education Network) to be able to participate in the forthcoming AfricaConnect project extension and to draw maximum benefit from it, and thereby to ensure WACREN’s integration into the global Research and Education networking community.

TANDEM’s long-term goal is to make it possible for researchers and academics to contribute with their peers around the world to the socio-economic development of the West and Central African Region.
TANDEM will include focus on services for user groups, including raising awareness of the benefits of eduroam and identity federations. 

The project will promote and reinforce, by focusing on research topics such as health, food security, the environment, connectivity and the implementation of global e-infrastructure services, the deployment of a Regional Research and Education Network (RREN) and their interconnection with the European Research and Education network (GÉANT). To be more effective towards this goal, TANDEM also includes among its partners DANTE, UBUNTUNET and CLARA, all of which are directly involved in issues related to global interconnections of international networks.

The end-users are:

• Connectivity services (IP, VPNs, DNS, etc.); 
• Mobility and authentication services (e.g. eduroam, identity federations, certificates); 
• Applications which give access to data repositories, data visualisation tools, computing grids, etc.; 
• Collaboration tools, e.g. web-conferencing, file transfer, user group management tools, meeting management tools, wiki, etc.

Duration : 24 months
Partners : IRD, WACREN, DANTE, RENATER, CIRAD, Sigma Orionis, Brunel University, UbuntuNet Alliance, RedCLARA