MISTI Africa
MISTI Africa facilitates a range of activities to connect MIT students and faculty with Africa. For more information or to participate, please contact us.
AITI
The Africa Information Technology Initiative (AITI) is a student-run organization that promotes economic development in Africa by cultivating young technology entrepreneurs. AITI sends MIT student/instructors to Africa to hold courses at African universities.
Our courses focus on mobile technologies, and are structured so that our students are awakened to the commercial possibilities of the technologies. Components of the course include detailed technical curriculum, funded business competitions, guest lectures, and networking events, all to help our students develop and realize their ideas. Furthermore, AITI seeks to positively influence education on the continent by transferring teaching expertise to our African partner universities so that they can incorporate components of our courses with little intervention. AITI provides our MIT participants with international education, technology, and entrepreneurship experience, and the program is often described as life changing.
Since 2000, AITI has sent nearly 100 MIT instructors to teach over 1200 African students, resulting in the creation of African businesses and the addition of course offerings at our partner universities.
MISTI South Africa Forum
MISTI and the University of Witswatersrand have partnered to create exchange programs between MIT and South Africa. MIT currently hosts visiting students from the University of Witswatersrand. Soon MIT students will have the opportunity to learn in South Africa by teaching OpenCourseWare (OCW) material or participating in iLabs projects or internships with corporate and institutional hosts.
MISTI/G-Lab: Global Health Delivery
G-Lab: Global Health Delivery is a Sloan School of Management project-based class tackling the challenges of delivering health care in resource-poor settings in Africa. After a broad introduction to global health delivery in Africa, students complete preliminary research focused on a specific project and outline plans for fieldwork. Students travel to Africa for an intensive three- to four-week team project internship with local collaborators at the host site. Through a partnership between MISTI, G-Lab and Total, MIT students explore distribution systems in both private enterprises and in health delivery.
MISTI Africa Faculty Fellows
The MISTI Africa Faculty Fellows program will bring faculty fellows from African universities to MIT labs and classrooms to engage in teaching, learning and research with MIT students and faculty. Back at their home institutions, MISTI Africa Faculty Fellows may continue collaborating with MIT by hosting MISTI students as research interns or for OCW or iLabs projects; and through research collaborations in conjunction with the MISTI Global Seed Funds.
iLabs
The MIT iLab Project enriches science and engineering education by vastly increasing the scope of experiments to which students have access over the course of their academic careers. Harnessing the power of the Internet, it enables students to use real instruments via remote online laboratories. Unlike conventional laboratories, iLabs can be accessed and shared from across a university or across the world.
With MISTI partnership, collaborative teams of MIT faculty and students work with colleagues in foreign universities to simultaneously integrate OCW content and iLabs modules into university curricula. Partner universities in Africa include Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria; Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
Funds for faculty projects in Africa: MISTI Global Seed Funds
MISTI offers seed funds to MIT faculty and researchers and their international collaborators to support early-stage international projects and research collaboration. Applicants are encouraged to involve MIT students – both undergraduate and graduate – in their projects.
Project highlight
Climate variability and malaria transmission in Africa
Collaboration between Professor Elfatih Eltahir, Earth System Initiative, MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Dr. Jean-Bernard Duchemin, Centre de recherches médicales et sanitaires (CERMES), Institut Pasteur
Description: The environmental determinants of malaria in the semi-arid Sahel zone of Africa are investigated with field research and numerical modeling techniques. We are involved in an interdisciplinary effort to explore the dependence of mosquito breeding and infection rates on factors such as surface water pooling, which is the result of various hydroclimatological variables. In a unique approach, mosquitoes in a small study area near Niamey, Niger, will be modeled numerically and a simulation coupled with a small-scale hydrology model. Model input includes satellite-acquired remotely sensed data for vegetation, soil moisture and topography. With results validated by field investigations, variation in mosquito abundance and infection rates will be simulated. This numerical modeling tool will shed light on dynamics of outbreak occurrence and help target intervention efforts.
Award: $19,000 for travel between MIT, Paris and Niamey, and workshops in Niamey
