African Light Source Project

The African Light Source is a pan-African initiative working towards the continent’s first synchrotron light source — and, just as importantly, the community of scientists, engineers and institutions needed to build, run and use it.

Africa is the only inhabited continent without a light source of its own. The initiative brings together researchers from across the continent and the diaspora, together with partner facilities around the world, to make the scientific, economic and political case for an African synchrotron and to prepare the people who will one day operate it.

The missionBuilding towards first light

Reaching an operating facility is a long road, and the project advances it on several fronts at once: training African scientists and accelerator engineers, both at home and at light sources abroad; growing a user community that already applies synchrotron techniques to African research questions; and developing the roadmap, conceptual design and partnerships that a facility of this scale requires.