ASFAP—STC Meeting

Wednesday 8 Mar 2023, 14:00 → 15:20 Europe/Zurich

Fairouz Malek (LPSC-Grenoble, CNRS and UGA, France), Farida Fassi (Universite Mohammed V (MA)), Ketevi Adikle Assamagan (Brookhaven National Laboratory (US)), Shaaban Khalil Ibrahim (ENHEP Egyptian Network of High Energy Physics (EG)), Simon Connell (University of Johannesburg (ZA))

Hello,

I have read through most of the document and I found a few things while going through the report I would comment on for to consider. I list these below in random order.

• LAMMPS acronym is incorrect in the chapter 5 ATOMIC & MOLECULAR PHYSICS. This chapter is also very sparse on vision; it is merely a repeat of what the ASFAP is doing (5th&6th paragraphs) and highlights of all the road blocks/bottlenecks but offers no solutions, recommendations  or priorities that would most benefit the African continent and its peoples. I would appreciate a justification or specific example(s) for the statement that “Unfortunately, for Africa, international organizations often support research of their interest...” I work for the United Nations and we are tasked to support our Member States and do not do research and development of own interest. 
• Abstract, Chapter 2: “...s that draw heavily on advances in physics, in addition to developing and enhancing collaborations...”. In addition: “ASFAP will take a few years with a final report to notify the African policymakers and broader communities concerning the strategic directions that will have greatest impacts on physics education and research in the next decade.” What are a few years? According to the timeline (Fig 1, noting endorsement is misspelled), the report is finished in 2023 (there is paucity in the granularity of the timeline .
• Chapter 18: I like the plan they have included; one might add working to establish partnerships with other organisations (societies, public organisations and private companies) for ideas exchange and strengthening empowerment of women physicists. I would suggest removing the last two words in “momentum in her career of research”, as not all physicists are in research. There are problems with capitalisations and typos to be corrected, too. Other items needing correction: was initiate, sacksful stories, laid emphasizes, action on the on, there was LOI specific (missing ‘no’), Organizer seminar, career in science for woman. 
•  Chapter 3: I would welcome some more concrete plans for the committee’s sustainability.
• Chapter 8: This chapter is already outdated, as the deadline for the survey and the conference in Stellenbosch was already 7 weeks ago. There are no highlights to this section and it was not well led. One should try to extract lessons learned from what went on, such as improving the relationship to the African Geophysical Society, as this would have been a risk mitigator: avoided abandoning the online event that was planned, been beneficial in the outreach for the survey and could have been used to identify and secure leadership, which would be a mitigation to the first risk they cite (no mitigation measures for their risks are given!). 
• Chapter 9: in order to implement the proposed strategy, partners in government, academia and industry are needed. I would welcome suggestions to achieve this. One might consider using benefits as milestones to attract support, as some of these partners might identify  incentives for engagement in some of the tangible benefits; active outreach would be helpful. What other means? For capacity building, one can mention current plans in Egypt and Tunisia and build on these:
  • In Egypt: EGYPlasma is an online platform and a stepping stone to building an Egyptian Plasma Society. For almost eight years in a row and in cooperation with the Center for Theoretical Physics at BUE, they have been hosting the EGYPlasma Spring School. This school targets BSc and MSc students in the Arab-speaking countries in the middle east and Africa. Each year, the ICTP provides support to 2-3 students from Africa to attend the school. The school also receives funds from the Alexander Von Humboldt foundation. In addition to that, EGYPlasma hosts:
    • a Plasma Basics Summer Course.
    • a database of most of the researchers in the field of plasma across Egyptian institutions. 
    • online seminars of the FusionEPTalks (in cooperation with the Fusion-EP MSc program), and the EGYPlasmaTalks. 
  • In Tunisia: ‘School of Plasma and Fusion Physics’ organized in MENA region. This school was organized in 2020 (https://sites.google.com/view/mpfus2020/accueil) for students from Middle East and North Africa region.
• Introduction: 
  • The major challenges cited, linguistic framework, educational environment, shortage of resources, lack of reliable access to electricity, inadequate infrastructure, lack of digital literacy, trained teachers and adequate learning material, and insufficient ICT, that hinder the progress, science knowledge creation and technological innovation on the African continent  do not clearly map onto the strategy. It should be easy for the reader to identify this. I would pick up on this in this in a easily digestible form (info-graphic or table) in the conclusions (chapter 21). Most people will concentrate on that last chapter anyway (harmonising the format of chapters would be helpful for stakeholders to browse through, too).  That is where the distilled strategy should appear, best as a roadmap or rolling roadmap.
  • I really like how the ASFAP is a bottom up effort, as this is indeed commendable, but how is this bottom up approach going to meet the top down ones cited in [5,7,8]? For example, what specific areas does the ASFAP offer benefits to achieving aspirations and transformational outcomes of the AU Agenda 2063 (reduction in the proportion of unemployed youth,  African Speed Train Network, industrial transformation of the continent, doubling of ICT, education-level and living standard improvement, gender parity, restoring and preserving Africa’s cultural heritage are areas that could leverage support, cf comments to chapter 9)? You will need the buy-in of the stakeholders in the top down approaches, in particular to ensure success in achieving the aim of ‘influencing directions of strategic science development taken by policymakers.’ 
  • Some spotted typos and corrections: ‘widely and deeply consultation’ (should have adjectives and not adverbs modifying consultation) and remove the comma in the sentence; ‘4.) the strengthen’ should be a present participle and remove the second comma in the following sentence (note the following sentence is not a sentence); 
• Chapter 6 has a nice list of recommendations. I would consider having equivalents in all chapters! Especially the idea of a Pan-African society that is well linked to other equivalent societies globally is a good one, as such an entity can be influential in achieving the other recommendations (scientometrics study, events, advise on libraries, curricula and academic infrastructure and champion in liaising with other stakeholders and publics).
• Chapters 7, 15, 16, 20 also lists recommendations, but those in chapter 12 are nearly hidden (nice idea of regional centres, for example); in chapter 4 the recommendations were extracted from LOIs (ditto for chapter 10) and a plan to ultimately develop own WG recommendations, in chapter 17 a recommendation appears as an invitation, in chapter 18 as a plan, in chapter 19 as a table. A common format in the presentation of recommendations would be helpful. It is from those recommendations that goals can be prioritised and from those priorities a strategy with milestones in implementation (starting from the present scenario, which -i.e. existing infrastructure, capacity, etc.- is captured in many places in the document, and boldly leading up to a future vison for specified dates) can be developed, which is what I expected to read about in chapter 21, where a common vision is promised but not forthcoming. 
• Chapter 11 points out many of the obstacles to establishing a light source on the African continent but does not suggest alternatives as a possible means for bypassing the obstacles. For example, one might consider regional ion beam sources to serve the community as a less costly and more accessible goal. Any central light facility has issues with accessibility, as is a lesson learned from the Canadian Light Source experience.  A travel fund to promote access and capacity building to existing sources is important.
• Chapter 14: One might also add in the subchapter 3 mention that there are AFRA Regional Designated Centres (African Regional Cooperative Agreement for Research, Development and Training related to Nuclear Science and Technology RDCs) in Energy planning in South Africa and Sudan.

I hope this is of some help.

Greetings from Vienna,

Melissa D.

 

Discussed the Melissa report

 

Simon to fix glaring simple editorial and grammatical errors

Make a new version

 

The significant issues raised by Melissa can be learnings for the strategy going forward

 

Serious issues mean we drop the contribution

So we drop 8

 

Must send a polite letter

Could say we recieved feedback from IAC

Then we include it in the full report.

They see the feedback

 

List of all we have dropped should be made and this who

Medical Physics and Jamal Narrative also dropped

Explained this already .. so don't need to notify them

Nuclear Physics — has members of AFRA NEST, na this is a large active community that should be engaged

Not all our Conveners have worked as hard as we would like

 

Ketevi replies to Melissa

Thanks her for the feedback

Explains our plan in going forward, benefitting from her feedback