What South Sudan Research Network Inherits

South Sudan has launched SSuREN. Here is what Africa’s research and education networks are doing right now that it can build on.

South Sudan, the world’s youngest country, has launched the world’s youngest national research and education network (NREN): the South Sudan Research and Education Network (SSuREN)—(South Sudan NREN)

The country’s universities have long paid high prices for limited bandwidth and unreliable service. Acting alone, no single institution could negotiate better rates, and beyond connectivity, the higher aspirations of building the advanced digital services that modern teaching and research depend on. An NREN lets them do this together and links them to regional networks and the global research and education community.

SSuREN exists because three things lined up: a government willing to commit, universities willing to collaborate, and support from the World Bank. For the past six months, KCL founder Tusu Tusubira has led professional support to the SSuREN Taskforce, working with our colleagues Ali Ndiwalana and Walter Nyero.

At the launch workshop, UbuntuNet Alliance CEO Prof. Madara Ogot and Research and Education Network for Uganda (RENU) CEO Nicholas Mbonimpa shared lessons from years of building and running research networks in the region.

“This effort is about more than connectivity: it is about building the national human capacity needed to drive development and competitiveness in the 21st century.”
  — Tusu

Four years from first conversation to launch

It took four years to get from a first diplomatic meeting to a launched network. In September 2022, Prof. Ogot and a GÉANT colleague met South Sudan’s chargé d’affaires in Brussels to discuss first steps. One point was settled early: the government of South Sudan would have to own the process.

At the time, South Sudan had about 30 colleges and universities and no NREN. That meant no route to the affordable regional connectivity, and especially the advanced services that UbuntuNet Alliance provides to its members.

Late starters are catching up faster than the early movers did. About a decade ago, a World Bank review of African NRENs found no recorded NREN activity in Lesotho. In October 2025, the Lesotho Research and Education Network (LesREN) was welcomed into UbuntuNet Alliance. Countries that start now inherit two decades of what worked.

A continent on the move

The new network arrives as Africa’s research and education networks move well past basic connectivity. Five shifts stand out:

• Regional backbones are reaching new countries. WACREN has extended its backbone to The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, and Senegal. A 10 Gbps link between Lagos and Cape Town now lets it peer directly with South Africa’s SANReN. Guinea-Bissau is a network we know well: KCL supported RNEP-GW through its roadmap, action plan, and entry into WACREN.
• Research computing is arriving. In March 2026, KENET launched an expanded GPU cluster for Kenyan researchers, part-funded by the EU through AfricaConnect3. Kenya’s Principal Secretary for Science, Research, and Innovation, Prof. Shaukat Abdulrazak, called it a shift “from aspiration to infrastructure and from infrastructure to sovereignty.” WACREN, for its part, plans to federate high-performance computing across its member countries.
• Funding is continuing. The EU has granted a further €40 million to AfricaConnect, now in its fourth phase under the Global Gateway strategy.
• Access is getting simpler. Through a federated sign-in pilot run by Research4Life, UbuntuNet Alliance, and GÉANT, Ugandan universities, including Makerere, are onboarding through RENU so researchers reach scholarly databases with their own institutional login.
• African research is becoming easier to find. Since September, UbuntuNet Alliance has trained librarians in Kigali, Salima, and Johannesburg to run the open repositories that put a country’s own research online.

What a young network can borrow

The newest NREN has one advantage its elders did not: it can copy what already works. From what peer networks are doing now, six practices are worth adopting from the start:

1. Make the value case early and keep making it. At an AfricaConnect4 workshop in Gaborone last month, BotsREN CEO Tshepo Tsheko told emerging networks that government backing and a clear value proposition keep an NREN relevant as commercial ISPs grow.
2. Build trust and identity services alongside bandwidth. Federated sign-in, Eduroam, and access to platforms such as Research4Life are what students and researchers notice every day.
3. Exchange people, not only reports. RENU and Brazil’s RNP are running a staff exchange from 2026 to 2028. UbuntuNet members were also selected for GÉANT’s Emerging NREN Programme at TNC26 in June.
4. Plan for compute from day one. KENET shows how a national network can become the shared home for research computing that no single university could afford.
5. Help institutions publish, not only consume. National repositories and trained librarians make a country’s own research visible to the world.
6. Tell impact stories, not activity reports. The Gaborone workshop pushed NRENs to show the difference their services make for researchers and learners, rather than listing what they did.

Why this matters beyond the campus

An NREN is part of the public infrastructure a country needs if it wants to own any share of its AI future. Our AI Division has argued that Africa’s AI divide runs deeper than its digital divide: the harder questions are who holds the compute, the data and the skills.

A national research network answers part of each question. Through it, universities can share computing power, host and exchange their own data, and train the engineers and researchers who will build and test AI systems for local needs. Without one, a country rents all of this from someone else.

This is not a new position for KCL. The 2021 feasibility study we prepared with the World Bank on connecting every African higher education institution to high-speed internet budgeted for national and regional research networks alongside upstream bandwidth. SSuREN puts one more country on that path.

What comes next

The launch starts the harder work. SSuREN now has to connect its member institutions, settle a governance and funding model that universities can sustain, and build the team that will run the network.

Next week, the region’s research and education networks meet in Lilongwe for UbuntuNet-Connect 2026 on 29–30 October, under the theme “Shaping Digital Horizons.” The conference also marks twenty years of UbuntuNet Alliance, whose founding CEO was KCL’s own Tusu Tusubira.

The path ahead for you with KCL

For 25 years, KCL has supported the digitalisation of universities and the establishment of national research and education networks across Africa, South America and Asia. Guinea-Bissau and South Sudan are the most recent chapters. We work with governments, universities and development partners on:

• Feasibility studies, strategies and roadmaps for national research and education networks
• Economic and financial analysis for NREN models that last beyond donor funding
• Leadership development and capacity building for NREN boards and teams
• AI strategy and readiness for universities and research institutions

If your country, university or programme is weighing this step, talk to us at consult@kcl.co.ug.