Extensive teaching experience gained by conducting bioinformatics training courses in Kenya, Uganda, Mauritius (UoM), SriLanka, Sweden, Chile and Zimbabwe showed that it was difficult to successfully teach and demonstrate several bioinformatics resources, due to and often limited by slow Internet access. For that reason a bioinformatics platform, eBioKit was engineered to ease the administrative burden of regularly updating large databases and installing software. This platform contains more than 300 bioinformatics applications (EMBOSS, Galaxy, Blast, RSAT etc), and most relevant databases (ENSEMBL, Uniprot, OMIM, PDB, etc) locally, solving the network speed related problems and problems associated with the installation of software. Version 2 of this system has been successfully tested in real world situations both for capacity building and research in Kenya at ILRI, the Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA), KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme (KWTRP) and The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE). The system has further been deployed in the SANBio bioinformatics network in Southern Africa (10 countries) and Sri Lanka (Version 1) and has recently been adopted by the H3ABioNet African Bioinformatics Network as a platform to provide bioinformatics training and bioinformatics computing services at nodes in the network (http://www.h3abionet.org).
