The Carpentries in Africa

Looking back at 2021

The Carpentries in Africa grew from strenght to strengh during 2021. During the year the African Carpentries Community participated in 19 workshops across 5 countries (South Africa, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya and Mauritius). Also, more than 25 new instructors were badged from 10 countries (South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan, Tunisia and Uganda). Furthermore, the first virtual CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021 took place from 6 to 17 September 2021. The event included 2 Carpentries workshops, 1 Carpentries instructor training event, 2 networking events, 1 learning session and 1 opening address.

What We Do

  • Monthly African Community Meetup: Our monthly African Carpentries Community meetups have been running since 2017. Here we discuss topics that are of interest to our instructors in the African context, including previous and upcoming workshops, available resources, opportunities, events, and more. We would love to hear more voices at our monthly online meetup, on the 4th Thursday each month, 12:00 - 13:00 SAST (10:00 - 11:00 UTC). If you are keen to join please sign up at our Etherpad.

2022 meetings:

  • ~~27 January

  • ~~24 February

  • ~~24 March

  • ~~28 April

  • ~~26 May

  • ~~23 June

  • ~~28 July

  • 11 August (CarpentryCon@Home 2022 at 9:00 SAST, 7:00 UTC)

  • 22 September

  • 27 October

  • 24 November

  • Mentoring for Instructors and Helpers before a workshop: Some members of the African instructor community are willing to host online mentoring sessions for instructors and helpers before a workshop to ensure everyone knows what to expect and what is expected of them. If you are available to meet with an instructor/helper team before they run a workshop to answer any questions they may have or to help them prepare for the lessons they will be teaching, please get in touch via our email and we can pair you up with a team at a time and date that will suit you.

  • Angelique Trusler, the African Capacity Development Manager, is ready to help you with any questions you have about running Carpentries workshops or any other ways you can get involved with The Carpentries in Africa! Contact her at admin-afr@carpentries.org

Join Us

To join the conversation about The Carpentries in Africa, sign up at Topicbox and join the Slack channel #local-africa. If you’ve trained as an instructor in Africa (even if you’re not qualified yet), sign up at Topicbox

We would love to get more people involved in specific activities to support our growing African community - meet the South African instructors here!

Subscribe to the calendar below to watch all that is going on throughout our community.

Community Calendar goes here


Historical support

The first Carpentries workshops in Africa were run in 2013 but it only really kicked off in 2015. An African Task Force was established in 2016, consisting of international mentors from the USA, UK, and Australia, and guided the first batch of trained African instructors through the checkout process as most of them were very isolated and new to the world of The Carpentries.

Since then more than 100 African instructors have participated in online or in-person instructor training events. The African Task Force was revived in December 2017, then completely consisting of African instructors. The task force played a role in mentoring instructors who had been trained but hadn’t qualified as well as qualified instructors who needed support before teaching a workshop. Small online sessions were hosted by task force members to demonstrate how various lessons are taught and to help solidify skills in the tools we teach. The second African Task Force finished its activities in December 2018. Some of the South African-based activities were funded through the Rural Campuses Connection Project II (RCCP II), which ended in March 2019. You can read more about the experiences of the African Task Force in this blog post and about RCCPII here.

Blog posts on Carpentries activities in Africa