UbuntuNet Alliance mounted its fifth Research Repository Stewardship Programme (RRSP) workshop from July 27-29, 2026, in Maputo, Mozambique. The workshop was a milestone for the Alliance, delivering its first workshop in Portuguese. This is part of the Alliance’s drive to be more responsive to its multilingual member countries. Hosted by the Mozambique Research and Education Network, MoRENet, 40 participants from across Mozambique attended. The RRSP workshops are sponsored by the Invest in Open Infrastructure Fund (IOI) and aim 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 the 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.
The workshop opening ceremony was attended by the Permanent Secretary from the Ministry of Education and Culture, Hon. Mrs Ndiça Massinga, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Communication and Digital Transformation, Hon. Ms Nilsa Miquidade, the National Director of Digital Transformation and Innovation, Hon. Mr José Sambo, the CEO of MoRENet, Mr Moises Mucelo, and the CEO of UbuntuNet Alliance, Prof Madara Ogot. During her remarks, Hon. Mrs Ndiça Massinga emphasised to the participants the importance of open institutional repositories as an avenue to make Mozambique’s research more visible to the world.
The workshop, facilitated by Paulo Lopes, Manager, Open Access Scientific Repositories of Portugal, Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional (Foundation for National Scientific Computing), and Raquel Truta, Universidade do Minho, Portugal, attracted participants from institutions with and without open repositories. A post-workshop survey found that ~37% of the institutions represented had a repository. For those who did not, most (~75%) came into the workshop with plans to develop a repository, with 54% expected to be live within the next 1-2 years.
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.
