 Good afternoon everybody from Lesotho in Southern Africa. I'm delighted to be joining RLEU UK this afternoon to talk about a subject that is very important to me. But this subject is one that I could speak about all day because it's very important to me, but I think it should be important to libraries, but particularly those of us who are concerned with digital shifts and equity in access to knowledge. This is the title of my presentation and I will speak this afternoon on digital initiatives in Africa and creating an environment for digital equity. And I'm delighted to be joining me here. That's the topic of my discussion this afternoon, but I particularly look forward to engagement with colleagues that are participating at the end of my presentation. This will be the outline of my presentation. I do it more to order my thoughts and how the conversation is going to flow. I will talk about, first there will be an introduction and I will go on to talk about infrastructure initiatives that provide a framework structure within which digital content can be transmitted. A key element of that is skills development on the continent of Africa. And then I will talk about something that preoccupies us a lot as librarians, how to increase the digital content and what is happening in that area of digital content, and then I will then conclude. So in terms of introduction, as you may have been away from the abstract, this paper will explore Africa wide development initiatives around digital infrastructure, creation of digital content, as well as skills development. It also explores other and new initiatives that have emerged, especially during the period of COVID-19. It also explores the whole question of how digital equity can be achieved in Africa in order that Africa's youthful population will find relevant content online. So when I talk about Africa, I'm not talking about one country. I'm talking about 54 different countries that have different jurisdiction and sometimes different languages and different ways and different laws governing their access to information. And so that means that the practices, the legal framework, the technological framework, and even the language may vary as much as the colors of the map will vary. And in my presentation, I will touch on examples from a number of countries. And obviously, one cannot speak about a continent as large as Africa ably in 25 minutes, but I will draw on some examples and we'll read further and discuss further about examples from elsewhere. Furthermore, the population of Africa is 17.2% of the world's population, but the bulk of it is under 50 years of age, over 20% is under the 50 years of age. And that is Africa's hope that the youthful population of Africa will demand a digital infrastructure in which they work because as we know, millennials live online and in order for libraries to remain relevant to the youthful population, they have to work on putting more and more content online. You'll have seen in research that only 4% of African digital content is available compared to 96% of the world. And that is a big concern for the continent whose population is 17% of the world's population. One would have thought that perhaps the amount of digital content should go somewhere close to the population size, but not so different. Also significantly, if you look at the map on the right, only two archives and these are physical archives are on this map. And this map is either inaccurate or represents what the one who created the map knew. And this needs to be changed by exposing more African archives and African libraries. And I hope that by the time we finish this presentation, we'll be thinking differently about this, but also that by the time a number of projects come into play, this map would look different. This is an important slide in that it shares what is the thinking at Africa-wide level within the African Union, that priorities for cooperation and development, especially around digital transformation, speak to the need for improvement of the digital infrastructure as a major priority, but also development of digital skills as a second major priority. That is located at the highest level in Africa, of the African Union. And I see that in many countries that have developed digital transformation strategies, that creation of a digital infrastructure takes priority related to creation of essential skills or development of essential skills, and then also the issues of conflict. So in terms of infrastructure, what is it that confronts us? This has become important, especially with the increase in the era of COVID-19, because more and more content has become digital by the whole process of digitalization has increased during COVID-19. Also important because if a structure is not particularly protected and people are not aware of issues around cybersecurity, it would endanger a lot of the work that we do in people's rights online. So the ITU also shows that a number of African countries are committed to issues of cybersecurity. 29 of the countries have passed legislation to promote cybersecurity, and Tanzania and Mauritius need the PAC and also spend energy and investment educating their citizens about the value of cybersecurity. Internet speed is a crucial element of the infrastructure because it speaks to the ability to transport content and the quantities that we can transport. We are aware that a number of African countries still use 3G networks, and by June 2021, only about seven 5G networks were active across the continent. And that indicates that the speed is not really too fast. The internet speed in a number of our countries is a bit slow, and that again speaks to the amount we can upload. A favorite one for me in the infrastructure is the cellular penetration in Africa that has been spoken very widely about 46% of the world. And the implication for a useful population is that most of our content must be mobile-friendly so that we can reach younger populations. This is a slide that you can look at later. Again, it speaks to the extent to which mobile economy is penetrated sub-Saharan Africa. In terms of skills development, infrastructure is one leg. Skills development is another important leg when we talk about digital transformation. And we've seen that in an earlier slide that development of digital skills is important on the continent and has really been placed as a priority at the African Union but also in the different countries. There has been a surge in online training during COVID-19 because it was largely the only way of doing business. Higher education also came to the party by increasing digital literacy offerings so that students could work and learn online. But there's always a question of what then happens to the wider community who takes responsibility for developing their skills. Is it government? Is it private sector? Or are they left to fend for themselves? And in this slide we'll see some examples of some initiatives. So there's a number of activities that have happened related to the library sector and I've just picked one. The work that's done by LibSense to develop skills of librarians and research networks and this is one link to a workshop that was done to develop skills of librarians to work and operate in the digital environment. There's also national training interventions and I'll share just a few. One from South Africa, one from Kenya, one from Ghana. The National Library of South Africa while it does offer training on an ongoing basis took advantage of the Presidential Employment Stimulus Plan and that was offered by President Cyril Ramaphosa to alleviate the challenges of COVID and give skills to young people. So the National Library of South Africa created a project and trained 413 young graduates in digitization and also employed them to do some digitization work and I'll talk about it a little bit later. But this was an example of taking opportunity to give digitization skills to a group of young graduates. In Ghana and Kenya, if you go to the websites of those libraries you'll see that there is a link to training programs and national libraries have taken a responsibility to provide general populations with digital skills and different types of digital skills. Both in Kenya and in Ghana, the question is always, is that adequate? Is the work being done by the national libraries adequate to cover the populations? In terms of the digital content development, once you've got the infrastructure and you've developed the skills, the next leg is creation of the digital content that will then move on that infrastructure, particularly related to libraries. In my earlier slide I talked about that there's 4% digital content from Africa and there's the dire need to increase at 40%. The number of us from the continent are committed to seeing that 4% increase. There's also a need to decolonize the space by way of bringing in more voices from the global south, bringing in more voices, digital spaces from Africa, bringing in more voices from marginalized so that digital space are not occupied only by leading voices, only voices of power, but that there is more voices that are heard in digital space. Thirdly, it's crucial that the use of Africa that are increasingly working in digital space find relevant content for their engagement, so that when they go online they can recognize themselves. They don't find on the content from elsewhere without content from their own space. So it's crucial, fourthly, for supporting research with appropriate content, research that works towards national development and development of the continent, but also for policy development that there is need therefore to increase that content from Africa in digital spaces. So these are my examples again where there's been efforts to increase the digital content. I mentioned the National Library of South Africa's skills development project, but in the one year that the project was on, the National Library of South Africa and the National Archives were able to add 250,789 documents online that were otherwise only available in print, and that's quite a massive increase of digital content added. Libraries are working increasingly as publishers using the open access framework to publish journals, peer-reviewed journals from via universities, from neighboring universities and neighboring countries, and I have examples that I'm sharing there from the University of Cape Town, they publish both books and refereed journals. My own National University of Lesotho, we've piloted now with three journals and are working on increasing them. University of Stelenbosch has a number of journals that it also publishes and some from beyond South Africa, and in Ghana, the Kwame Kroma University of Science and Technology has a space where they publish online journals from the university. There's also other projects and one that is really in the upcoming is the Africa Commons in which a number of organizations, an organization based in the US, are working with partners in Africa to digitize and disseminate Africa's cultural heritage, to promote digital repatriation, to bring African resources and African digital content to Western scholars and Western institutions, and build an interest and understanding of Africa and its people as equals, enabling us to eyeball each other in the digital spaces. And the project seeks to provide online tools to institutions to be able to digitize disseminated discover, and the link to the Africa Commons is provided there. Other initiatives that I want to share, African journals online that the link is provided there as a database of online journals published in Africa. There's work that Lipsons does that promotes both the library and their national research networks in publishing content from library, creating a policy framework, creating skills, creating infrastructure in order that there may be a framework within which African content can be made digitally available. And forthcoming is a project called Hidden Collections Africa, which the Council on Library and Information Resources is working on, again working towards digitizing hidden collections in Africa that are currently maybe only available in print. And so as I draw to a conclusion, it is evident from the few examples that I've drawn and the work that the libraries are doing to publish and to digitize that there is a commitment from Africa to work towards achieving digital equity in order that knowledge development represents all of humanity, that the African voice is part of humanity's voices, that the voices that are in those spaces represents all of humanity, not just one sector. And there's a lot that we all can start to think about, what can we do to make this possible? What is it that we can contribute to work towards digital equity? What is it that our institution, our network can do to work towards digital equity? It's crucial that we all work towards decolonizing knowledge. It's important that as knowledge workers, we can eyeball each other, we can work as equals and ensure that knowledge from different parts of the world becomes available for human development. For us in Africa, it's really crucial for our young populations that they can find that digital content online. Again, we must ask ourselves, what are the possibilities? What does it mean to decolonize knowledge? What are some of the ways that we can engage with this discussion and take it forward? And as you have seen from examples that I have shared here today, African institutions are working together with their partners to pursue presence and significance in digital spaces so that Africa's youthful population will find relevant content, will build on the relevant content that they find, will find themselves and identify with being online and that they will not be either or that they will not feel like foreigners online because the content that is there does not really speak to them. And in closing then, this quotation from Aelo Uma really spoke to some of what I've been trying to say this afternoon that Africa's digital transformation offers an exciting opportunity. But the success requires solutions that reflect the context and nuances of the continent's needs. And that, I thought, summarizes well what I've been saying this afternoon. So I thank you for your attention and for joining me this afternoon and I look forward to further engagement with you. I thank you. Thank you so much, Brishalee. That's a really interesting talk. And we're starting to get some questions coming in already. So I'll just pose a few to you just now. You talk a lot about skills development. You mentioned some really interesting skills development programs that are going on. What do you think the continued role of collaboration is going to play in that going forward? Please say that again, Lisa. Sorry, speaking too fast. You talked a lot about skills development that's going on in the moment and I just wonder if you'd be able to say what role collaboration is going to play in the skills program development going forward? Thank you very much. I think there is a lot that we can do together. We are stronger together. When we talk about skills development, it obviously says somebody has the skills and somebody must be developed. And as I've shared this afternoon, a number of organizations that have gone ahead of us, a number of institutions that are here that maybe have gone ahead of us, that are citizens of the digital spaces, maybe able to identify the skill sets that they have developed and could offer those to institutions in Africa and work together collaboratively to develop skills. And African institutions that have gone ahead also could work collaboratively with other their neighbors and other institutions who are committed to increasing digital content to develop their skills. I think identifying opportunities for collaboration, especially now that we are working largely in a virtual environment and we can share some of these skills digitally that we don't need to be travelling. We can do this from the comfort of our home. That's great. Thank you. You also talked a lot about infrastructure and what do you think libraries can do about infrastructure going forward? So libraries themselves don't build the infrastructure. We benefit from a good infrastructure. But I think sharing best practice and sharing some of the infrastructure that has worked could be beneficial. But some of the work that Lipson starts to influence policy that affects infrastructure is crucial. Our networks can work together to influence policy development that either speeds up the development of infrastructure or opens up the infrastructure. And so working together in the area of policy development is really crucial. And that's why collaboration is a numbers game could really help us to influence policy development in terms of infrastructure. Thank you. You also talked a little bit about the colonisation of knowledge and I wonder if you wouldn't mind expanding upon that a little bit and maybe how that speaks to libraries as publishers. Yes. I often tell you a story and I think previously when I spoke I tell you a story of how some of the books I read when I was growing up were about Thomas Hardy and Daffodils. I don't grow in Southern Africa. And I could imagine what Daffodils were. And I didn't get to know what they were until many, many years later. That there's really need to put content that is relevant to people in Africa that is familiar to people in Africa that makes them not foreign as in digital spaces. So that we need to create an environment where there are more voices. There are more voices in terms of digital content. There are more voices and more knowledge from marginalised populations. And when I speak about decolonising knowledge spaces really saying knowledge spaces should include my type of knowledge. Should include knowledge from people of the south that we shouldn't be hearing only the northern voice. That digital spaces should not be dominated by one culture or one language. And that we should be hearing different thinking, different processes. And I think we are enriched by that. We are enriched by hearing from all of humanity so that digital spaces is a citizenship space for all of us. Not just some groups, not just some genders and not just some languages. That's right. Carol also has a question that's falling on from this one and it's about decolonised African content and it's about born digital content. So things that are in social media or community issues. She's asking whether the National Libraries are sort of engaged in some selective web archiving or if there's any community archiving going on to sort of preserve and develop that cultural heritage. So I'm not aware of that work except the work that's done by the people Alex, the Alexanderina Library. I'm not aware of other activities by National Libraries but it's a crucial work that needs to be done. And I think issues of climate change, the fires that have started libraries, floods that have flooded some libraries, wars have made this even more imperative that National Libraries, Universal Libraries, National Archives should really be committing and working actively towards digital preservation of both born digital and even printed. So I'm not aware of some of this but it could be an area of growth. That sounds great. I have a few questions now around the African archives that you referred to. Sorry if I said that wrong, I think, but she asks can you clarify which two African archives you're referring to in your presentation? I'm not sure if you would know that. I'm not sure which ones they are because those little flags seem to start in one country and add in another. But I suspect from where they sit, they are both in Southern Africa. So it could be that they are referring to some in South Africa and some in Otwana and Zimbabwe. But there are archives in Kenya, in Uganda, in Egypt, in Algeria. And I think it could be a project that could be worked on to work on improving that map so that it is represented here, so that it reflects where some of those archives are located. But I think what could also be even more interesting could be in addition to locating those archives that really deliberate effort of working on digitising their content so that it is available online are also pursued. Sounds great. Karim in the chat has also said there's an open archive which is set to be published in two years, so that's one that's ongoing at the moment. Jeff Brewell at King's College London also says thank you so much for the presentation. And he says that he became to cooperate via the Archives Africa project that they helped launch a few years ago to continue to support African colleagues with that. And so leading on from that comment, there's another question in the chat that says would you consider partnership working between libraries in the UK and in Africa? I think it's crucial, especially for historical reasons. UK and many African countries have a shared history. And I think the whole question of digital repatriation takes on a different meaning because it's one of those very low hanging fruit in the relationship between British archives or British institutions and African archives because there could either be duplication or there could be archives that were moved to the UK at the end of the colonial era. So it really sets a low hanging fruit for digital repatriation of collections that have already been digitized so that wherever they are in Africa they are not starting from scratch. The important work that's already been digitized. So digital repatriation is one but also a skills exchange in the digitization process is also another. And I also think that actually also finding opportunity to co-digitize as it were and exchange the digitized content so it is not just one way traffic while there's repatriation on another there's also a process of enhancing. We did such a project when I worked at UNICEF between an institution in Germany and UNICEF library in each way exchanging the work of the Jesuit missionary societies where some content was held at the University of South Africa library and some content was held at the University of Hamburg and we were able to digitize and exchange and both institutions got richer in the process. So it's really finding such low hanging fruit that we could work together to enhance both our institutions. That project sounds absolutely fascinating. A bit of a broader one now. Suzanne has asked is the publishing world doing enough to support eG through indexing and global databases? No. I think more could be done and I was hoping I could avoid this topic but I'll talk about it now. More could be done to index African journals in global databases but there's a whole lot of politics there and it often goes to quality and I often ask what quality my food because a lot of African scholars referee their journals and so when those scholars write in Africa and referee each other's work does the quality suddenly change so more work needs to be done but another area that I think has disadvantaged Africa is the whole area around open access but it offered hope for increasing voices from Africa and the global south. As more and more publishers have gone this route and increased their paid fees a new form of exclusion has emerged where African scholars cannot afford the huge author pay fees and the voices are again being marginalized and that's why the growth of online publishing that some institutions are doing in Africa has become so important so that we can publish in a way that we can afford but also the good quality work of the scholars from Africa can be uploaded to digital spaces and people can read and learn what is research going on in Africa especially now during the pandemic when we need to be exchanging information we saw just how important it was in the discovery of Omicron that it's so important to share information So true at the moment it really is Jane's got another question which again talks a little bit about the digital content side of things so she's asking what is being digitized at the moment is it mostly historic material or is it modern material and your things So as you know the area of digitization the elephant in the room is usually copyright and if we can find permission from authors digitize current work and work that's been on digital but if we don't have copyright then we focus on work that is in the public domain and that is historic but my view is that it is important to preserve both history but also current knowledge because we do need to promote current research and the pandemic has taught us again about the importance of sharing current information timely I think if those databases had been closed we might not have been able to learn about Omicron as easily as we did because the databases were open Yeah that's true it's amazing how quickly that knowledge came to light and how well shared and how the world has been able to use it so effectively Just a few comments in the chat here I think Jenny Skinner says an amazing presentation she says as SCOMA which is UK Library and Archives Group in Africa seeks to widen membership and participation is there any way that we can formally contribute to these efforts and collaborate as a group and she says she hopes that maybe she can speak to Jeff from King's College on that one as well I'd be really delighted to follow up on these conversations after this presentation because I think there is real opportunity for collaboration and there are many opportunities for collaboration SCOMA working together with ISABICA and other archive organizations within Africa it's crucial this is this is a time to almost as it were to be open and to grow together because sharing that information is so crucial so I really would be happy to continue this conversation with Jeff and I didn't see who was starting with Jenny with Jenny yes please I'd be happy for us to to chat Stuart Dempster from the University of Hampton also says that there might be an opportunity to coordinate future collaboration with the commonwealth education program and he's put a link in the chat to that UNESCO UNESCO has really done great work by publishing the new guidelines the new recommendations on open science and I think those will go a long way towards creating a policy framework within which higher education in Africa can grow the sharing of its own research research in open spaces because the guidelines yeah Stuart Dempster also has a good framework very quickly sorry I think your internet dropped out there must be those senate exams that are going on at the moment and Stuart Dempster is also asking again to what extent the services like future learn get used and is there the opportunity to develop some co-designed OER content I was coughing I didn't hear that question Stuart Dempster has also asked to what extent the services like future learn get used and also is there some opportunity to develop some co-designed OER content higher education in Africa is committed to OER content and we often say that we is high education we don't want to be net consumers of OER but net contributors so there is a real opportunity for collaboration and the fields of health have done incredibly well with OER collaborative OER and exchanging health information and jointly developing content as well as publishing health journals in open access has really helped the content grow so yes there is room for collaboration in the OER development as well that sounds great you talked about in your presentation about African Commons how far away do you think that is from coming to fruition a lot of work has gone on even as we speak there is a meeting going on and I think the launch date is sometime in April and so a lot of content has already been made available in Africa Commons and work to find more institutions to participate is going on and the real opportunity for that is that it speeds up and scales digitization because they use metadata I mean they use AI to create metadata so that it speeds up the process of discoverability of content and so we are really looking forward to that I think the launch date is April but I can't give an exact date sure that sounds fascinating because I know we had a lot of discussion in the UK about the use of AI you also talked about bringing that content to Western students and scholars how do you think you might go about that and so there will be a deliberate effort by Africa Commons to market this content to Western countries I mean to Western institutions and the model we hope will work this way that the content will be open and freely available in Africa and will be available on subscription to institutions that can afford it or that are in the West and some of the income will go back to the institutions so they can digitize more content so it's a model that we hope will help to create capacity for digitization but also sustainable digitization because the equipment is expensive so the dual model of free for Africa and the South but also a subscription for institutions that can afford and we've seen a lot of interest when we've made a presentation on the topic I know that's something we'd be very interested in if you'd like to work with I've got another question from Jody Butterworth they talk about the endangered archives program which provides funding to digitize materials in regions where resources are limited Nigeria continually ranks 4th and accessing digital content what can we do to raise the profile of this material so that other African countries can access this material so I'm not sure whether that 4th or 5th is accessing is it a positive or is it a not a positive what can we do to raise the profile of this material to other countries I think it's marketing it and making it available in more places that more marketable I hope that it can connect with Africa Commons it can connect with some of the organizations that are in Africa and that we market that widely so that other organizations can see and for sure I think our colleagues in Africa Commons would want to to connect with that it's also again about sustaining the stuff that has been digitized what we often find is that some stuff is digitized and then the links are lost and then the content is not easily discoverable or that the funding changes and then institutions then the content gets locked away so there is a sense in which we need to keep checking whether this content is not somewhere lost in the web that the links are not broken that it is in spaces where it can be discovered that it is shared widely on platforms like this that's great thank you very much the RLUK has posted a question actually they've also said thank you for your presentation they'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on virtual reading rooms as a way of providing virtual access to collections that doesn't depend on digitization I'd be keen to explore further discussion on that because that's content that's already available digitally and we are not, as I said not only looking at historical content we are looking at relevant content that the youth can find relevant content as they go online so we'd be keen to explore further how the virtual reading room could partner with institutions in Africa to grow access to digital content and also how we could put African content into those spaces so that it's a two-way traffic thank you we talked a lot at the beginning of your presentation about the challenges of working at that sort of continental sort of level with the 54 countries and I imagine that must be a huge challenge do you have any sort of small, original things going on that you're contributing to at the moment if you talk about around that yes I often say when I talk about Africa it's like if you must eat an elephant you must eat it in small bites and so an approach that looks from the eastern and from the western for your convergence is important because as I said these are not only different countries it's different languages it's different cultures and so you'll find that a regional approach countries with a similar language group working together would help countries with similar a cultural group working together but we do need to work together at continental level as well so that we can share we can share information and so platforms like this platforms that share information digitally platforms that encourage working collaboratively across the continent then become important but to be aware that really one of the challenges is language one of the challenges is infrastructure that varies from country to country technology infrastructure infrastructure and also legislation that varies from country to country but we must overcome them because the cause is bigger we've got to increase that 4% and work to change the infrastructure the policy environment develop those skills so that we can increase that 4% it is imperative Africa's youth needs it thank you very much that's great I just have another question on skills development programs I think given the flux we've had in the last few years with the pandemic and what have you have you got any sort of new ideas for skills development things that you think you might need to take to the next generation of students and then people yeah I think time to discuss whether we should be introducing digital literacy at what level in education is long pass I think we should be assessing the impact of the old programs looking to identify gaps in skills development whether it's institutionally or continentally or nationally that we constantly looking at our own practices have they benefit have they taken us where we want to go are their skills gaps and do that on an ongoing basis what other interventions should we be developing to close what opportunities who should we be collaborating because as libraries and library institutions you can't do everything by ourselves but we can collaborate with others to develop those skills we can collaborate with universities we can collaborate with ICT institutions but it's important to assess the gaps to assess the impact of our programs and identify new areas in which we need to to be training people and giving people a new skills area of cybersecurity is a new and growing and crucial area and the area of digitization as we saw in South Africa for forecasting and historical documents and archives is is crucial and and urgent because this is accidents of fires and floods will eliminate our history if we don't preserve our content digitally. Thank you and a final question from Carol she says that job 1 certainly does seem to be as much content as possible but she wonders if there's also broad efforts in shared discovery portals or other shared discovery efforts of some kind. Thank you for your question. We can never overshare. We can never have enough sharing and so it's important that we constantly sharing on job 1 sharing also in other spaces because discoverability is about sharing and putting the things we know in spaces that can be discovered to avoid duplication avoid reinventing the wheel but also to share skills so it's important that we share we publish in as many spaces as possible in as many networks as we can and that we speak with each other. Yeah absolutely with that and thank you so much especially for both your presentation today and for answering everything I threw at you there because there's a lot of very questions. I hope that this is just the start of a bigger conversation and I think there's certainly lots of people in the chat who are keen to speak further with you and get involved in some of the work you're doing and so I hope that this is just the start of something good to come to the screen as all. Thank you Lisa I think there will be plenty of conversations but you talk about what more can we do after this presentation and contributions on the chat are so important to try to go forward from here there was a question about whether this chat would be saved in order for us to follow up I'm sure it will be but I am looking forward to us engaging with the colleagues that had an interest in sharing in reconnecting after this meeting so that we can find opportunities to collaborate we can find opportunities to work together because the elephant is big and we need to work together to consume it