The Tertiary Education and Research Network of South Africa (TENET) was thrilled at the South African Identity Federation’s (SAFIRE) admission to join eduGAIN as its 41st member and the first fully participating member from Africa.
South Africa’s membership of eduGAIN will provide local academics and researchers with an easy way to log into over a thousand participating services worldwide using their home organisation’s username and password. Federated identity services play an increasingly critical role in facilitating access to big science projects, and so South Africa’s participation in this space is an important milestone towards allowing South African scientists to further collaborate in international research.
Prof Ina Wagenaar, Vice-Dean for Teaching and Learning at UJ’s Faculty of Science, said the membership would vastly improve opportunities to effortlessly link to a global community to prepare students for global citizenship. “Scientists will be able to share resources in a wide variety of fields and thereby contribute to our goal of global excellence in Teaching and Learning.”
Information for South African research and education institutions wishing to participate in SAFIRE is available at https://safire.ac.za/participants/idp/. Academics can visit https://learn.nsrc.org/fedidm to learn more about identity federation.