UbuntuNet Alliance mounted its fifth Research Repository Stewardship Programme (RRSP) workshop from August 5-7, 2026, in Nairobi, Kenya. The workshop, attended by 51 librarians from across Kenya and facilitated by Prof Madara Ogot, the CEO of the Alliance, was unique in that all participating institutions had a working Open Institutional Repository. The focus of the workshop, therefore, was strengthening, not establishment. The workshop, hosted by the Kenya Education Network (KENET)and sponsored by the Invest in Open Infrastructure Fund (IOI), sought to equip participants with the tools and skills to strengthen existing open research repositories or establish new ones at their institutions. The workshops are being run in each of UbuntuNet Alliance’s 16-member countries, targeting 560 librarians to increase the number of open institutional research repositories in the region from approximately 190 to over 400 by 2027.
During the opening ceremony, KENET CEO, Prof Meoli Karshorda, informed the audience of the challenge KENET had in selecting the participants, given that KENET has over 80 eligible member institutions. The decision came down to selecting those with the highest research impact, as measured by Elsevier, including both public and private universities and research institutions. He thanked the Alliance for their support and for providing a forum for KENET to engage with librarians from their member institutions and for the librarians to network among themselves.
Participants also completed a current status survey. The 30-item instrument addresses governance and strategy; content and submission; access, rights, and legal issues; metadata, quality, and interoperability; preservation and technical issues; and data protection, security, and risk. With 5 as the high score (meaning most areas covered in the survey are fully addressed at their institution), 45% of those survey returned a score of between 4 and 5, with 43% scoring between 3-4. It was impressed on the participants that the score was not as important as the gaps they had identified that could form the basis for prioritisation and development of an implementation plan to strengthen their repositories in those areas.
The Research Repository Stewardship Programme is one of three run by the Alliance and its member NRENs, under the IOI-funded project, Unlocking Potential: Elevating Open Institutional Repositories in Africa for Global Impact. The other two are the DSpace as a Service Engineering Bootcamp for NREN system engineers and the Research Data Stewardship Programme, an intensive Training of Trainers for institutional open data champions to be run in 2027. Combined, the three capacity-building programmes seek to significantly increase the number of open institutional repositories across Eastern and Southern Africa to enhance the discovery, accessibility, and reusability of research outputs from and about Africa.
