Engaging a Data Revolution: Open Science Data Hubs and the New Role for Universities in Africa

Abstract

This paper presents a new ideology for engaging Africa in a data revolution. It explores the idea of creating open-science-data-hubs (OSDH) at flag-ship universities in Africa to preserve and share both internally and externally produced data. Although limited in the technical aspect, the objective here is to explore the pragmatism of how and why such an endeavor in Africa should be undertaken. This paper argues that the African university is uniquely placed to play this new role in today’s technological world and discusses the characteristics and foundational pillars necessary to set up such a program. The arguments provided here challenge Africa to be smart and adopt clever solutions to their data generation, collection and access problems, by finding value and a new role in the intellectuals and institutions of higher learning and in the necessity to involve them in the generation, preservation and sharing of data and knowledge that can be used in the policy formulation process.

Keywords

• big data
• data revolution
• open-science-data-hub
• flagship-universities
• africa