Eric Healing, Director of IT Services, recently visited the Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme (MLW) in Blantyre, Malawi, to assist with the creation of a computer network to allow better sharing of research data across all of MLW sites in Malawi. Meetings were held with Malawi’s leading internet provider to investigate how connectivity between sites could be improved both in terms of connection speeds and reliability of the service.
Eric Healing said ”Malawi has recently benefited from improvements in internet infrastructure with an additional fibre connection coming into the country via Mozambique which will effectively double the in-country bandwidth. Previously, any problem that occurred with the single fibre connection from Zambia could stop internet connectivity across all sites. The Chikhwawa site is particularly vunerable to internet loss as emergency medical images are often sent to HQ for diagnosis puposes.”
A plan has been prepared to improve both the speed and reliability of the internet connections for all MLW sites and tenders have been requested from the leading providers in Malawi. Additionaly the Malawi team are running a pilot of the Office365 service made available via the LSTM IT team and, if succcessful, this will provide improved tools for research collaboration.
The LSTM and MLW IT team will work closely together to establish the MLW improved connection and to complete the Office365 trial.
MLW is an internationally recognised centre for research and research training, strongly supported by LSTM, the Univeristy of Liverpool and the Wellcome Trust. MLW research is focussed on 4 main research themes: malaria, TB and HIV, non-communicable diseases and microbes, immunity and vaccines.