The Franco-South African PHC PROTEA 2025 / NRF SA/FRANCE Project “Towards Future 6G Digital Infrastructures” (52338XG) is a collaboration between Sorbonne Université (LIP6) and the University of Cape Town (UCT) that is crucial for the DIGITAfrica (GA 101187966) initiative at large. By focusing on experimental research in 6G Digital Infrastructures, this project directly contributes to DIGITAfrica’s mission to establish a pan-African Research Infrastructure (RI) in Digital Sciences, specifically by exploring solutions that are both flexible, robust, and accessible and economical for the African context.

Year 1: Building Foundational Pillars

The first year of PROTEA successfully strengthened scientific and human foundations, accelerating progress on key technical objectives:

• Pioneering 6G Architectures: Our teams achieved strong scientific alignment on the evolution of 6G architectures, intelligent resource orchestration, and network slicing.
• AI/ML for Resilience: We have been jointly developing approaches that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for real-time network optimisation and security.
• Capacity Building in Action: The successful mobilities of Sorbonne Université PhD students Theodoros TSOURDINIS (Sept 2025) and Alexandros STOLTIDIS (Nov 2025) to UCT strengthened expertise exchange on 5G/6G edge networking and resource management. This work reinforces the objective to strengthen scientific skills through the exchange and training of young researchers.

Building the Pan-African Digital Research Infrastructure: The DIGITAfrica plenary meeting

The intensive Franco–South African cooperation flowed directly into a crucial event for the strategic vision of DIGITAfrica: the Plenary Meeting held at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis from November 26 to 28.

This meeting was essential for co-constructing the strategic framework and blueprint for a comprehensive pan-African Research Infrastructure (RI) in Digital Sciences. To ensure that the technical work from the PHC PROTEA project was integrated into this vision, all partners from both SU and UCT delegations (A/Prof Mwangama and Tariro Mukute) attended the meeting.

Their collective participation ensured that cutting-edge 6G research and expertise; particularly on network slicing and RI utilisation; directly informed the strategic planning of the DIGITAfrica Research Infrastructure, strengthening the entire Euro-African scientific community.