Workshops Educate African Researchers On How to Publish With IEEE

There's a quiet apocalypse hiding in the footnotes of science: the future is being engineered right now, but only certain people are allowed to leave their mark on the blueprint. When researchers in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda struggle to pay publication fees and library subscriptions, they aren't just being priced out of journals—they're being priced out of the shared imaginary that defines what technology *is* for the rest of the century. IEEE's outreach, offering discounts and hands-on publishing workshops, is a genuine attempt to pry open the gates. But the stubbornly low paper count reminds us that access, by itself, is not the same as voice. The workshop itself is a fascinating artifact—a sort of first-contact ritual between local innovators and a global knowledge infrastructure built largely in the Global North. Teaching scholars how to format, submit, and navigate peer review is more than administrative coaching; it's induction into the cargo cult of citation indexes and impact factors. Dana Graviton has written before about the speculative power of archives: what gets stored shapes what can be imagined later. For technologists in Kampala or Kigali, breaking into that archive means winning the right to be a *source* of tomorrow rather than merely its audience. And yet the gap persists, and that's the detail worth sitting with. Discounts lower a barrier, but they don