Following my last entry about the joint project of HP and UNESCO to alleviate brain drain in South Eastern Europe, I would like to focus now on our second project to lessen brain drain in another region Africa.

Last November we launched the second project “Piloting Solutions for Reversing Brain Drain into Brain Gain for Africa”, which focuses on the reduction of brain drain in Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe. It costs African countries up to US$4 billion annually to replace qualified professionals who emigrate, which is an immense sum. HP and UNESCO chose five universities for their ability to connect with their Diasporas in order to carry out advanced scientific research.

The project kickoff took place in November 2006 at the UNESCO headquarter in Paris, where an Education Ministry delegation attended, as well as Jeannette Weisschuh – Head of Corporate Affairs and Philantrophy Manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) – and Michel Benard – WW Director of Technology Programs, HP Universities Relations - and Mr Georges Haddad, Director of Higher Education at UNESCO.

Then we had our first steering committee in Maputo – Mozambique – which included a workshop on Grid infrastructure. I presented the plan and strategy for each of the participating African universities projects.

HP will provide equipment – including servers and grid-enabling technologies – and local human resources to the universities, as well as training. Beyond the provision of technology and training, HP will fund research visits abroad and meetings between the five universities.

UNESCO will be in charge of the overall coordination and monitoring of activities, as well as administrative management, evaluation and promotion of results. After its first two-year implementation phase, the project may well be extended to cover other countries.

The second steering committee will take place at the HP learning center in Kenya coming November, in order to mark the start of this project. This includes the checking if each university has received its equipment, has been able to install the right level of required functionalities with assistance from us and has started to build its databases.

I am proud to be part of such projects. Our brain drain project in Eastern Europe has already successfully shown what can be achieved and I am looking forward to seeing what the five selected universities do. It is amazing to see what technology can achieve and how it can overcome such problems as brain drain. I am happy to hear what you think about these projects and whether you have been ever engaged in similar projects alleviating brain drain. I am looking forward to your comments.

Arnaud Pierson, EMEA Strategic Business Programme Manager, HP University Relations

For additional information on Piloting Solutions for Reversing Brain Drain into Brain Gain for Africa please click here for a recent interview.