UbuntuNet Alliance Awarded IOI Grant to Strengthen Open Institutional Repositories Across Eastern and Southern Africa

Big news for our community!

We are proud to see this impactful development in strengthening Open Institutional Repositories across Eastern and Southern Africa, an effort that continues to leverage the foundations laid by AfricArXiv since its launch. This effort has been almost a decade in the making since AfricArXiv was launched in 2018 by Justin Ahinon and Dr. Jo Havemann. Explore further, https://access2perspectives.org/initiatives/africarxiv/. This milestone demonstrates the growing regional momentum toward open, community-driven scholarly communication and highlights the collaborative role our partners play in shaping equitable research infrastructures.

Key anticipated impacts of this initiative include:

Greater global visibility for African research: Strengthened and newly created OIRs, together with AfricArXiv’s expanded role as a regional metadata aggregator, will significantly increase the discoverability and reuse of African scholarship.
Increased local capacity and skills: More than 1,000 librarians, researchers, and system engineers across the UbuntuNet Alliance’s 16 member countries will be trained in repository management, open data stewardship, and metadata standards, strengthening institutional self-reliance.
Better access to high-quality African datasets: By supporting the creation and curation of 960+ open datasets, the project will help fill Africa’s persistent data gaps and improve evidence-based research and policymaking.
A strengthened networked ecosystem for open science: Through AfricArXiv, the project will aggregate hundreds of thousands of metadata records, ensuring African outputs are visible in global discovery systems.

🔗 By Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI): https://investinopen.org/blog/empowering-networks-advancing-openness-invest-in-open-infrastructure-announces-inaugural-grantees-of-the-ioi-fund-for-network-adoption/

Collaborating Organizations: