African Light Source

The African Light Source (AfLS) foundation is the community driven and community mandated initiative to develop and progress the roadmap for realisation of an Advanced Light Source on the African continent. The origins of this Pan-African effort began in the 1990s, with the first usage of synchrotrons by Africans and the first formal written proposal penned into the 2002 Strategy and Business Plan of the African Laser Centre (ALC).

Rationale

The primary rationale is that the Advanced Light Source is the most appropriate multi-disciplinary and multi-user large scale research infrastructure that can support the science that is necessary to address the challenges facing Africa. Africa faces significant challenges. These include its high disease burden, the exploration and beneficiation of its mineral wealth, development of innovation pipelines for competitive industry towards established African wealth, the need to urgently address all 17 of the UN SDGs, discovering and curating its rich evidence of global human heritage, both as the cradle of human-kind and also early human civilisation, the largest projected youth population of the world - requiring massive capacity building, amongst other challenges. Many of the sciences that address these challenges can be very well stimulated and enhanced continent-wide with a focus on an Advanced Light Source. Of course, here, “light” refers to electromagnetic radiation from the infra-red to the hard X-ray regime, enabling the most quantitative analytical microscopies down to atomic length scales.

The concept of a large scale research infrastructure benefits the entire continent. The African Light Source (AfLS) project leaves no African country behind. Each country benefits from the same upgrade in terms of human capital and improved local and regional research infrastructure. This infrastructure simultaneously offers premier training opportunities and competitive research infrastructure, as well as enabling feeder infrastructure to all light sources world-wide, but especially to the AfLS on the African continent. The country that wins the bid to host the AfLS will of course become a regional hub, but in many cases, the COVID era has boosted our capacity for remote work. Researchers can take advantage of 4IR technologies in science experimentation, as robotic technologies allow experiments to be planned and controlled remotely from the home institution.

The mega-innovation hub that will spring up in the science-industry park that surrounds the AfLS will benefit all industry on the continent. There are other socioeconomic benefits. One particular current focus for Africa is to have its own Intellectual property in its own vaccine for a future pandemic. In the current pandemic, Africa has the capacity to produce vaccines under license at several pharmaceutical installations on the continent. However, for a safer planet, as shown in the current pandemic, it is preferable that all habitable continents have independent capacity to develop their own medical interventions, which then compliment the global search for solutions.

Furthermore, the AfLS represents successful Pan African science diplomacy. Boosting Africa to participate fully in the global science endeavour will lead to the increased profile for African Science, as well as increased professional travel and communication. This ultimately builds appreciation of our human diversity. Ubuntu holds us all to be one human community.

Africa is now the last habitable continent which does not have a light source. Other continents not only have several such large scale infrastructures, but they are implementing or planning the upgrade to the so-called fourth generation instrument. This upgrade is not a factor of two superior, as might be expected, but a factor of ten thousand superior, considering the product of improvements in both beam and detector instrumentation. It is also the case that the training of students at such facilities has long since overflowed to industry, leading to the concept of second generation of student training. The Industry supervisors now demand a next generation of young emerging scientists at the Advanced Light Sources. The Advanced Light Source has become a premier research solution for these countries. It is therefore imperative that Africa get started on a light source of its own. It is also worth noting that the African User Base of such facilities, and their excellence in their own scientific communities, in Africa and in the Diaspora, has long surpassed the custom-of-practice threshold for the minimum size of User base for the initiation of a continental Advanced light Source programme, the AfLS. Indeed, an AfLS would be an essential feature of reducing the current brain drain, and encouraging some of the African science diaspora to return.

Taking the contributions to capacity building, research, technology, innovation, wealth generation and Pan Africanism all together, this also contributes to the goal of the final decolonisation of Africa and the deracialisation of the world.

African scientists and nations have a rapidly growing knowledge in using light sources. The majority of the continent have at least one to very many research outputs generated as Users of International Synchrotrons. South Africa participates formerly with a Scientific Association in the ESRF and Egypt is a member country of the Sesame light source. This continental participation provides not only access to the facilities for researchers, but also capacity building and training across many aspects of synchrotron operation and technologies which is necessary to have the right skills in place for a future African light source.

In December 2017, Diamond Light Source, UK established the Synchrotron Techniques for African Research and Technology (START) with a £3.7 million funded by the UK Research and Innovation for 3 years. START aimed to provide access to African researchers with focus on energy materials and structural biology.

In 2018, during the 32^nd African Union meeting, in Addis Ababa, the African Union’s executive council called on its member states to support a pan-African synchrotron.

African Light Source Foundation

The African Light Source (AfLS) logo by AfLS Foundation

The multitude of conversations towards the African Light Source culminated in the First AfLS Conference held in November 2015 with 98 delegates from 13 African nations at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), Grenoble, France. The conference led to the Grenoble Resolutions which encapsulate the formation of the AfLS Steering and Executive Committees, the AfLS Roadmap and the creation of the AfLS Foundation itself, registered in South Africa. The AfLS Foundation is chaired by Professor Simon Connell. The Roadmap of the AfLS includes community based activities such as Human Capacity Building, Building Networks, developing the User Base, Conferences, Workshops, promoting Mobility for accessing international facilities and building the Local and Regional Facilities that support research leading towards effective participation at international light sources. The AfLS also promotes Pan African and African National activities at Policy Maker level, including regional and pan African co-operation in a range of projects that give profile and enhance the progress towards the AfLS. The AfLS Foundation is actively working upon the Conceptual Design Report (CDR) for a light source in Africa.. The Ghanaian president, Nana Akufo-Addo, is the first African President to express the intention to champion the project, on the occasion of the 2019 AfLS Conference in Ghana.

Regular Conferences, Workshops

The African Light Source Foundation has organised several international conferences and workshops since 2015, more recently, in collaboration with partner organisations and stakeholders generally. In the most recent virtual conference AfLS2022, held from 14-18 November 2022, there were almost 1000 registrations. Details of events by the AfLS and its partner organisations can be found on the AfLS webpage.

Africa Synchrotron Initiative

The Africa Synchrotron Initiative (ASI) of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS) was first formed in 2019 and chaired by the Professor Shaaban Khalil. After the COVID-19 pandemic period, it was reformed in Jan 2022

See also

• SESAME
• European Synchrotron Radiation Facility
• Diamond Light Source

External Links

• African Light Source foundation
• Africa Synchrotron Initiative
• Momentum grows for the African Light Source by Prof. Simon Connell, Youtube