Announcing The Carpentries African Capacity Development Manager, Angelique Trusler

For the past two years, Dr. Angelique Trusler has served as The Carpentries Regional Consultant for Southern Africa thanks to the generous support from the South African Center for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR). Angelique joined our team bringing depth, knowledge, and experience not only as a Carpentries instructor and community member in South Africa but also as a social sciences researcher and practitioner.

Developing a strategy for building The Carpentries community across Southern Africa has been Angelique’s passion and pride. Specifically, her leadership has helped us make progress on the following goals:

1. Addressing issues of equity and access appropriate to the region
2. Updating and maintaining communications platforms for the African Carpentries community
3. Running monthly African Carpentries community calls
4. Running a Carpentries membership drive for the region
5. Administering workshops and coordinating instructor training events across the region
6. Organising CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021
7. Developing strategies for financial stability and growth across the region
8. Contributing to South African open science activities

To date, we have a total of 103 badged instructors in 16 countries across Africa. Since 2013, we have hosted 90 Carpentry workshops in South Africa, 38 Ethiopia, and 5 in Ghana and Kenya, among many others, with a total of 150 workshops across the continent. Another milestone was the funding received from the CS&S Event Fund to host CarpentryConnect South Africa 2021. Also, Glosario, an open-source glossary of terms used in data science has added 5 African languages, Afrikaans, Setswana, isiXhosa, isiZulu, and Kiswahili.

Continued growth and development across Africa

As African Capacity Development Manager, Angelique will lead The Carpentries efforts to support and grow our instructor community and member organisations, and increase our collective impact on researchers across the continent. I could not be more excited and proud of where we have been, and now I will let Angelique share where we are going…

Message from Dr. Angelique Trusler

I am truly excited about my role as African Capacity Development Manager! We intend to create pathways to support regional Carpentries communities to capacitate scholars in foundational data science skills and programming across the continent. We further aim to increase participation, including the recruitment of new instructors, for existing opportunities as well as address issues of equity and access appropriate to the continent. We will continue to host The Carpentries in Africa monthly meetups every 4th Thursday, join us!.