UbuntuNet Alliance (UA) has continued to strengthen Africa’s research and education ecosystem through a Research Repository Stewardship Training Workshop held in Ethiopia from 5 to 7 October 2026. Hosted by the Ethiopian Research and Education Network (EthERNet), the three-day workshop brought together librarians and institutional representatives to strengthen their technical and operational capacity to manage institutional research repositories and promote open access to African scholarly outputs.
The workshop marked the 15th of 16 training sessions under UA’s Research Repository Stewardship Programme, representing a significant milestone towards completing the first phase of the project titled “Unlocking Potential: Elevating Open Institutional Repositories in Africa for Global Impact.” Funded by Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), the initiative seeks to strengthen institutional repositories across Africa, enhance research visibility, and promote sustainable open science infrastructure within the continent’s research and education community.
The training focused on equipping participants with practical knowledge and skills in managing institutional repositories using DSpace, a widely adopted open-source repository management platform. Key areas covered included open science principles, institutional repository workflows, metadata quality, research discoverability, and the development of appropriate institutional policies to ensure the long-term sustainability of trusted digital repositories.
Beyond strengthening technical competencies, the programme emphasised the critical role of librarians, repository managers, and institutional administrators in preserving and disseminating African research outputs. By building local expertise, UA aims to empower research and education institutions to manage their scholarly resources effectively, improve access to knowledge, and increase the global visibility of African research.
The initiative also contributes to UA’s broader ambition of establishing a more interconnected and sustainable research repository ecosystem across Africa. Central to this vision is the Open Pan-African Repository (OPAR), which seeks to enhance the discoverability and accessibility of African scholarly outputs by connecting institutional repositories and supporting collaboration across national and regional research and education networks.
Through partnerships with NRENs, including EthERNet, UA continues to promote shared infrastructure, institutional capacity development, and collaborative approaches to managing research information. These efforts are expected to contribute to reducing barriers to knowledge sharing, strengthening research collaboration, and supporting the adoption of open science practices across African higher education and research institutions.
The successful implementation of the Ethiopia training represents another important step towards completing the programme’s initial capacity-building phase. With 15 of the 16 planned training sessions reached, UA is moving closer to its objective of equipping African institutions with the knowledge, skills, and infrastructure necessary to preserve, manage, and share their research outputs sustainably.
Through this initiative, UbuntuNet Alliance reaffirms its commitment to advancing open science, strengthening Africa’s digital research infrastructure, and ensuring that African knowledge is increasingly visible, accessible, and impactful both within the continent and globally.