| dc.description.abstract | It is expected that improved connectivity will enable African Tertiary education and research
institutions to generate a proportionate amount of intellectual property goods to achieve parity
with the rest of the world. Nevertheless this vision can only be attained through intensive
collaborative activities. The emergence of large-scale e-infrastructure projects in Africa reflects a
trend toward more complex configurations of scientific collaboration. This paper investigates the
concepts of synergizing which denote the active processes of creating and managing
relationships among people, organizations, and technologies in the creation of e-infrastructure.
The paper also explores how embeddedness is not only an important result of infrastructure
development, but is also a precursor that can act as both a constraint and a resource for
development activities. The researchers are more interested with the process of creating and
maintaining productive socio-technical relationships, which they refer to as synergizing. Human
infrastructure posits that complex infrastructures come about through complex interactions
among networks, place-based organizations, groups, and consortia. Through a multiple case
study approach and integrated literature survey, the research examines how two e-infrastructure
initiatives; UNESCO-HP brain gain and HP catalyst projects attempts to make use of these
concepts to foster e-research and draws specific lessons for African HEIs. The study revealed
that the two dominant e-research projects have adopted approaches that favor synergizing and
embeddedness in e-research however despite funding of 24 projects in 21 HEIs, visibility of
Africa in e-research world map is still wanting. | en_US |
