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The African Light Source (AfLS) project is now almost eight years old. This article assesses the history, current context and future of the project. There is by now considerable momentum in building the user community, including deep training, facilitating access to current facilities, growing the scientific output, scientific networks and growing the local laboratory-scale research infrastructure. The Conceptual Design Report for the AfLS is in its final editing stages. This document specifies the socio-economic and scientific rationales and the technical aspects amongst others. The AfLS is supported by many national and Pan-African scientific professional bodies and voluntary associates across many scientific disciplines, and there are stakeholders throughout the continent and beyond. The current roadmap phases have expanded to include national and Pan-African level conversations with policy makers through new Strategic Task Force groups. The document summarizes this progress and discusses the future of the project.
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Africa is the only habitable continent that is not yet host to a light source - an important tool across disciplines. Scientists from the Executive Committee of the African Light Source Foundation discuss work towards building an advanced light source in Africa, and what remains to be done.
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We studied the COVID-19 pandemic evolution in selected African countries. For each country considered, we modeled simultaneously the data of the active, recovered and death cases. In this study, we used a year of data since the first cases were reported. We estimated the time-dependent basic reproduction numbers, R 0 , and the fractions of infected but unaffected populations, to offer insights into containment and vaccine strategies in African countries. We found that R 0 ≤ 4 at the start of the pandemic but has since fallen to R 0 â¼ 1 . The unaffected fractions of the populations studied vary between 1 - 10 % of the recovered cases.
