Implementing a digital repository to increase access to agricultural higher education research and learning in Africa: The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture experience

Providing access to knowledge outputs is important to support development in Africa through strengthening learning, innovation, and avoiding duplication. However, although there has been an increase in the research output from the continent, a lot of it is still inaccessible. Institutional repositories have been identified as a feasible means of closing this access gap, which would help to showcase research and making it visible to search engines and thus easy for users to discover. RUFORUM’s Theory of Change envisions the network becoming a continental reference point for agricultural research and higher education, a goal that will require increasing access to the network’s rich knowledge base. The RUFORUM Institutional Repository, launched in 2013, provides a boost towards achieving this goal. Presently, the repository is an online storehouse for the collection, storage and retrieval of the network’s knowledge output and holds close to 1,500 publications comprised of student theses and dissertations, journal publications, conference papers, project reports, as well as corporate and research outputs from the RUFORUM Secretariat. Three years after its launch, this paper documents reflections on the operations, challenges and lessons learned drawn from implementation of the repository and the way forward. The main challenges relate to the length of time taken to upload documents, acquisition of publications, and access restrictions instituted by publishers, including universities.