Chem4Energy: a consortium of the Royal Society Africa Capacity-Building Initiative.

The Africa Capacity-Building Initiative is a Royal Society programme funded by the former UK Department for International Development to develop collaborative research between scientists in sub-Saharan Africa and the UK. Initially, four institutions were involved in the Chem4Energy consortium: Cardiff University in the UK and three African partners, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana, the University of Namibia and the University of Botswana, soon also including the Botswana International University of Science and Technology. The Chem4Energy research programme focused on 'New materials for a sustainable energy future: linking computation with experiment', aiming to deploy the synergy between state-of-the-art computational and experimental techniques to design and optimize new catalysts and semiconductor materials for renewable energy applications, based on materials that are abundant and readily available in African countries.