UbuntuNet Alliance mounted its fourth Research Repository Stewardship Programme (RRSP) workshop from July 14-16, 2026, in Gaborone, Botswana. The workshop, attended by 36 librarians from across Botswana, was facilitated by Prof Madara Ogot, the CEO of the Alliance, and hosted by the Botswana Research and Education Network (BotsREN). 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.
During the opening ceremony, Tshepo Tsheko, the BotsREN CEO, noted that, ” … BotsREN is here to validate what we have been working on as a service [DSpace-as-a-Service] to support open access. Establishing institional repositories is only useful to a country like Botswana if you can provide to others access to the repositories that you have built.”
The workshop attracted participants from institutions with and without open repositories. A post-workshop survey found that ~32% of the institutions represented had a repository. For those who did not, a large percentage (~57%) came into the workshop without plans to establish one. The participants, however, were optimistic that the training had adequately prepared them to make the case to their management for institutional repositories.
Participants also completed current status and readiness surveys for institutions with and without repositories, respectively. The 30-item instruments address 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.
From the surveys, with five as the high score, it became apparent that institutions without repositories are at the beginning of their individual journeys, with 67% of the scoring between 1 and 2. These preliminary survey results, however, shall help them identify urgent gaps and prioritise a few immediate actions as part of their repository development plan. Those with repositories were evenly spread across the scoring range, with 29% of institutions in each of the ranges 1-2, 2-3, and 3-4. For this group, the outcomes from the survey’s shall support their development of repository improvement plans to address identified areas that need strengthening.
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.
