News & Events

iMENTORS has opened its data to all unregistered usersin its last six months of operation. It is important that donors provide information about the aid they give. More important though is for the information to be publicly available in a way that people can easily understand. iMENTORS (www.imentors.eu) is the most comprehensive data map on ICT investments in Africa and contains data across a multitude of entities, classified as organisations, research infrastructures, fibre networks and projects.

 

Africa as a region and as individual countries, is slowly making a steady progress towards establishing national and Regional Research and Educational Networks (RRENs). Although still in its infancy compared to other world regions such as Europe where each country has an active National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) with established regional networks such as TERENA, iMENTORS database provides evidence for tremendous progress over the past few years.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

According to an article published on Devex, two donor agencies, a United Nations agency and a multilateral organization all did a “very good” job making their aid data more available and usable this year.

But while the U.K. Department for International Development, the Millennium Challenge Corp., the GAVI Alliance and the U.N. Development Program excelled, another 58 entities did fair to very poorly in this year’s aid transparency index, which begs the question: Is the aid community — particularly donors — taking the aid transparency agenda seriously?

iMENTORS (also funded under FP7) has been busy recording the IST-Africa project and related FP7 projects. iMENTORS enables organizations to connect with each other, share resources and link their ICT4D project proposal to the past or on-going projects.