The Global Access Program (GAP) is DataCite’s initiative to improve access and enable communities in lesser-represented regions to further benefit from our open infrastructure services, launched with support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (Grant 2022-316573). Throughout the next year, the program builds out DataCite’s international community with regional support and engagement in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Through focused regional engagement in these regions, DataCite will better support equitable access to our infrastructure services, ensuring that researchers and research organizations globally have the opportunity to benefit from persistent identifiers and metadata.
I’m excited to join the DataCite team as Regional Community Engagement Specialist – Africa.
In the past, I have worked as an IT professional in sectors like academia, IT consultancy, insurance, banking, telecommunication, oil and gas, actuarial, and lastly an agricultural research organization. Most recently, I was the institutional data manager at IITA, leading the team responsible for open access, open data, and open science. I led various projects including the integration of DataCite DOIs into the institutional data repository, integrated research repositories with the institutional data repository, development of a knowledge portal, development of a data collection quality control platform, and migration of various knowledge platforms. I led open-access outreach and engagement across all the countries where the organization has a presence. I promoted data management best practices at infrastructural and operational levels including the development of an institutional data management plan template, data management, and open data-related capacity building for students, researchers, partners, and government agencies.
Serving as a member of the DataCite Expert Group for EMEA endeared my heart to the DataCite mission. The opportunity to influence emerging economies with lesser PID penetration enlivens me. I love open data and wish to see African research outputs discoverable, accessible, acceptable, and reused. I am looking forward to promoting DataCite services in Africa to connect and open up the various academic, research, and data work being done in the continent to the outside.
I hope to reach African countries, governments, institutions, and the private sector and invite them to embrace and implement DataCite DOIs. This will involve direct engagements with leaders and bodies of knowledge and data custodians like librarians, data stewards, and especially decision-makers. I am hoping to engage them on what it takes to promote research in their organizations including infrastructure development, understanding of research data management, the roles and value of DOIs and metadata, and skill development to sustain this value proposition. Overall, I hope to increase the number of institutions currently using DataCite DOIs across Africa and increase awareness about institutional repositories and PID in the next year. The ultimate goal is to make African research outputs used globally.
I love being with my family, watching movies, taking a walk, reading, playing the piano, creating free content on cybersecurity (identity management, and data security), and doing video editing in my free time.
