AFRICA BUILD portal: Developing a social network of African health researchers and educators
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Date
2013-05
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Volume Title
Publisher
2013 IST-Africa Conference and Exhibition, IST-Africa 2013
Abstract
The AFRICA BUILD project aims to develop and support health care, education and research centres in Africa through Information and Communication Technologies. One of the main outputs of the project is a collaborative platform which integrates a myriad of research and learning resources. This article presents the first prototype of this platform: the AFRICA BUILD Portal (ABP 1.0). The ABP is a Web 2.0 platform which facilitates the access, in a collaborative manner, to these resources. Through a usable web interface, the ABP has been designed to avoid, as much as possible, the connectivity problems of African institutions. In this paper, we suggest that the access to complex systems does not imply slow response rates, and that their development model guides the project to a natural technological transfer, adaptation and user acceptance. Finally, this platform aims to motivate research attitudes during the learning process and stimulate user's collaborations. © 2013 The Authors.
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Keywords
AFRICA BUILD, Capacity Building, Education, Health Information, Resource Integration, Social Networks, Sub-Sahara