A digital hub for open research in East Africa to harness open research practice to generate new knowledge solutions to tackle key development challenges

With just six years to go to meet the urgent targets of the Sustainable Development Goals, we need to find new ways to harness the power of science to address critical issues of human health, welfare and prosperity.

Across East Africa, communities are grappling with complex challenges. In Tanzania, for example, agricultural practices must adapt to a rapidly changing climate. The widening learning gap needs to be addressed in Kenya. In Rwanda, a growing young population must be supported into meaningful and dignified employment. And the nutritional status of households needs to be improved in rural northern Uganda. Talented young researchers are eager to bring new knowledge, fresh thinking, and passion to find solutions to these challenges. But they are constrained by insufficient access to professional development and training programmes, limited access to prior research locked behind paywalls, and few opportunities for conducting collaborative research.

This is where AuthorAID comes in. Over the next 18 months we will be mobilising experts from the community to develop a digital learning programme that will ground East African researchers in open research practices and equip them to incorporate these into their research to enable them to collaborate with communities to find solutions to local problems, and to have access to the evidence and data that’s produced.

The learning programme will be the core pillar of our new digital hub for open research in East Africa. The hub will be hosted on INASP’s AuthorAID and elearning platforms which already connect 14,000 early career researchers across the Global South.

To anchor the digital hub more firmly in East African research centres we will also award up to three small grants to local teams to convene hands-on, practical learning sessions, building on the digital learning program, to enhance the impact of existing research projects through open science practices or to design new research projects to benefit local communities.

This project is funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc. (funder DOI 501100011730) under the grant https://doi.org/10.54224/33195.