Today, online services are crucial for research and education. These can be for e-learning, teaching and conferencing, scientific collaboration, analysing and sharing data, accessing journals and libraries etc. Access to these resources is usually controlled with a user name and password. As the number and variety of services expand, often being delivered by service providers outside the institution or even the country, the effort needed to manage and main all of these different user credentials becomes complicated and expensive.
To solve this, identity federations were established to allow participating institutions to authenticate users on behalf of participating service providers. Reducing the overhead on service providers and allowing users to reduce the number of passwords they have to manage. As international collaborations expand and services are offered to more and more users, the need to connect these national federations together resulted in the development of the eduGAIN interfederation service.
eduGAIN provides an efficient, flexible way for participating institutions, and their affiliated users and services, to interconnect with multiple authentication and authorisation infrastructures. This provides users with just one trusted identity provided by user’s own institution that they can use with potentially hundreds of different services around the world.
Today eduGAIN is used by 78 national federations worldwide and supports nearly 6,000 institutions and an estimated 30 million users.
Identity Federations in the African continent
In Africa, the development of identity federations has been growing steadily, with institutions increasingly embracing the value of secure, federated access to digital services. At the heart of this progress is eduID.africa, an identity federation designed by the UbuntuNet Alliance and WACREN under the EU co-funded AfricaConnect3 project for NRENs and institutions that have yet to establish their own. By accelerating the deployment of national identity federations across Africa, eduID.africa supports secure and trustworthy digital identities for the continent’s research and education communities.
eduID.africa joined eduGAIN and together they play a crucial role in accelerating digital transformation in African research and education.
Recently, five new countries joined the African eduGAIN community, bringing the total to 14 in the continent. The new additions are eduID.tg (Togo), eduID.bf (Burkina Faso), MAREN IF (Malawi), GARNET IF (Ghana), and TERNET IF (Tanzania). They join a vibrant and growing network that already includes Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria, Algeria, and Morocco.
By interfederating with eduGAIN, national identity federations can enable access to services and resources that are essential for their institutions students, staff and researchers and provides a secure, cost-effective and scalable approach to service delivery around the globe.
Users benefit by not only having a single set of identity credentials to access multiple services but also have the confidence that these services are themselves safe and secure.
Our heartfelt congratulations to the new joiners!
To learn more about eduGAIN, visit edugain.org
More on AfricaConnect3: africaconnect3.net
