LIBSENSE-RUFORUM: Collaboration for Improved Agricultural Research Data Management in Africa
LIBSENSE and the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) are working together in a broad framework to leverage digital technologies to advance knowledge discovery, use and sharing of agriculture research outputs, for informed decision-making and development in Africa.
The cooperation is guided by a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) and RUFORUM. The main objective of the cooperation is to enhance scientific and scholarly communication in Africa, through the AfricaConnect3 project and the LIBSENSE initiative.
As part of a collaborative agreement between RUFORUM and LIBSENSE, this project will address some of RUFORUM’s ICT objectives by supporting contemporary platform development to enable agricultural research data sharing and management.
The survey seeks to gather requirements for an open data repository through a survey of potential end users within the member institutions of RUFORUM.
Survey Validation Workshop
LIBSENSE and RUFORUM has held a workshop on the sidelines of the RUFORUM Annual General Meeting 2022. The AGM and the Workshop presented a fine opportunity to create more awareness of the strategic collaboration between parties and also chart the way forward for the collaboration for the benefit of the agricultural research and learning community across Africa. A key objective of the Workshop was held to validate the needs assessment survey instrument for the development of an open data and knowledge repository for the RUFORUM community. A key outcome was the identification of the need to provide more awareness about key concepts in the survey document.
Sensitisation Webinar
The aim of this webinar was to sensitize participants to key concepts related to open science and research data management which underpin the LIBSENSE-RUFORUM needs assessment survey for the development of an open data and knowledge repository for the RUFORUM community.
The webinar provided a platform for launching the survey to the community.