Google Cloud expands higher education credits to 8 countries in Africa

To better support equity and opportunity in higher education across the globe, we are proud to announce the expansion of Google Cloud research, teaching, and learning credits to eight countries in Africa: Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia. With the recent additions of five countries in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific, this brings our global community to 60 countries. 

We also recently committed to investing $1 billion dollars in Africa over the next five years, from improving connectivity to investing in startups. These new developments are part of our ongoing efforts to make cloud technologies available to more people everywhere-- and to drive more discoveries faster. With access to cloud technologies, researchers can make more breakthroughs and students can learn new technical skills to prepare them for the future.

The University of Ghana (UG) has already deployed Google Cloud’s integrated infrastructure for several key projects. Since 2010, they have used Google Workspace for Education to provide email addresses to all students and faculty. This has helped expand teaching and learning opportunities there, especially as the global pandemic minimized in-person contact. Francis Kwabena Boachie, Chief Information Technology Officer for UG’s Computing Systems, says that “educational Institutions with low budgetary support are able to benefit from high value IT infrastructure resources which otherwise would have been virtually impossible to deploy and manage. With Google applications, my IT team can offload a significant burden to Google so we can focus on other sectors that need attention.” 

Citizens need digital skills today. Google has already helped 6 million Africans get the digital skills they need to grow their careers and businesses. We’ve also trained 80,000 developers from every country in Africa. With Google Cloud credits, students, faculty, and researchers have access to best-in-class solutions for their workloads.

To ramp up your own research project with Google Cloud, apply now for free credits in selected countries.

To get started teaching with Google Cloud, apply for the Google Cloud Computing Foundations (GCCF) curriculum. GCCF offers a free 10-module, 40-hour curriculum designed to give faculty the tools to teach critical concepts like infrastructure, application development, data management, and machine learning to students with little or no cloud computing experience. Within each module Qwiklabs will include labs with step by step instructions. You can also apply for Teaching Credits to give your students real, hands-on experience on Google Cloud.

To supplement your own learning on Google Cloud, sign up to earn four Google Cloud skills badges that you can share on your social platforms.