Institutions and Personnel
The administration of the grant funds will be carried out by the School of Computing and Informatics, University of Nairobi, under the leadership of Prof. Timothy Waema.
Prof. Waema, the Team Leader, has a wealth of experience in managing research grants. For example, he has been the Lead Researcher in Kenya for the Research ICT Africa (RIA!) network for the last four years. This network is largely funded by IDRC. He has also been the Research Director/Coordinator of the Local Governance and ICTs Research Network for Africa (LOG-IN Africa), a pan-African network
of researchers and research institutions from nine African countries that has focused on local e-governance for the last two years.
Further, he is the University of Nairobi Research Leader in a bridging the global digital divide project in collaboration with 5 leading UK Universities and sponsored by the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Prof. Waema currently is involved in a number of ICT for development research projects, including investigating the role of ICT in alleviating poverty, e-readiness assessment of 50 universities in the Eastern Africa region and building roadmaps for higher levels of e-readiness, electronic waste management in Kenya, and business process outsourcing.
The School of Computing and Informatics has a lot of experience in offering Masters and Ph.D. programs and has a number of links with other schools or faculties of computing and/or information in the region. This experience will be useful in administering the Masters scholarships. The school is also very active in research on ICTs and development as exemplified by Prof. Waema’s brief profile above. This experience will be very useful in evaluating the applications for research grants.
In addition to the School, the Team Leader will invite active and prominent scholars in the host universities to be members of the Selection Committee. As mentioned earlier, MoUs will be created with these universities on capacity building and research collaboration. Experience on managing research grants can also be complemented by this selection panel from the region.