4-Dec-09 10:00 AM ACDT

IOP Pledges £10,000 to the African Physical Society

The United Kingdom's Institute of Physics (IOP) has agreed to provide total of £10,000 towards the launch meeting of the African Physical Society. The funds will help fund either registration or travel costs to help representatives of other African physical societies, or physicists from countries who do not have an existing society, to attend the launch meeting.

On November 14, 2009 the South African Institute of Physics and IOP convened a historic meeting in Cape Town, South Africa of many if not most of the existing national physics societies in Africa, e.g., the Cameroon Physical Society, the Ghana Institute of Physics, the Nigerian Institute of Physics, and the Tunisian Physical Society. Representatives from Senegal, Botswana, Algeria, Lesotho, Kenya, Zimbabwe and several others were also in attendance.

At this meeting there was strong and enthusiastic support for the formation of the African Physical Society as a Pan-African professional association of physicists, and as a networking medium and advocate for physics in Africa, reaffirming the decisions made at the 2007 EBASI meeting in Cape Town.