Welcome to AfricArXiv
This initiative showcases UbuntuNet's commitment to fostering knowledge sharing, collaboration, and accessibility within the African research community. With AfricArxiv, researchers across the continent have a dedicated platform to disseminate their findings, making them accessible to a global audience. By facilitating open access to scholarly work, UbuntuNet Alliance plays a pivotal role in advancing the principles of open science, enhancing research visibility, and driving innovation across Africa.
Communities in AfricArXiv
Select a community to browse its collections.
- The general repository is open for individual submissions by researchers, librarians and research administrators.
- Showcase of project activities, presentations, and scholarly contributions curated by the AfricArXiv initiative.
- Scholarly items sorted by country > Institution > Department
- A Rapid Grant Fund to address research questions and implement science engagement activities associated with COVID-19
Recent Submissions
International Relations Are What Humans Communication Literally Creates
(0005-02-26) Nabil Hamidi
What if human phenomena are nothing other than human communications? If political, legal, and social systems are subject to government regulations and restrictions, how is it possible that they nevertheless behave in socially constructed yet internally coherent ways? This paper advances a foundational claim: human systems exist only insofar as the human brain possesses the neuropsychological capacity to communicate. Societies do not precede communication, nor do they abstractly generate it; rather, societies are continuous products of physical communicative processes occurring in human brains. Communication does not explain why human phenomena exist in the first place, but it organizes and explains everything that is human and political. It is the fundamental and first neurobiological principle that explains why, when, where, how, who, and what humans politically and humanly do and feel in the world system as both bodies and brains.
DataCite Insights: Strengthening Open Science and Research Visibility in Africa (AfricArXiv Open Science Webinar Series)
(2026-02-18) Mohamad Mostafa
Mohamad Mostafa delivered a webinar titled “DataCite Insights: Strengthening Open Science and Research Visibility in Africa”, hosted by AfricArXiv. The session explored how DataCite is advancing Open Science and increasing the global visibility of African research outputs.
Mohamad introduced the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, outlining its key pillars and their importance for strengthening Africa’s research ecosystem. He provided an overview of DataCite and highlighted the role of the UbuntuNet Alliance DataCite Consortium in supporting regional collaboration and shared PID infrastructure.
The webinar featured a practical use case from Ahmed Siyad (SomaliREN), who showcased the Somali National Repository and demonstrated how they are using DataCite infrastructure to improve research discoverability and visibility. The session was moderated by Harold Bowa from the UbuntuNet Alliance.
Participants gained valuable insights into PID adoption, repository development, and strategies for building a more open, interoperable, and connected research landscape across Africa.
Reading habits pf Algerians during the COVID-19 Lockdown period
(Journal of Library Science, 2022-12-22) عزيزي, سهيلة; Boufidjline, Zohra
This study aims to evaluate Algerians’ reading preferences during the COVID-19 lockdown and find whether there is a correlation between reading habits and certain demographic factors. A descriptive survey design was adopted and a simple random sampling technique was used. To meet this endeavour, a web-based questionnaire was administered owing to the risk of paper and the total number of responses collected was 1002. Results revealed that Algerians’ reading habits were significantly improved during the lockdown. It was shown that, despite Algerians’ growing digital reading habits during the period of lockdown, readers still prefer reading on paper since it is more comfortable, and at that time, homes were the most popular reading locations.
The Evaluation of Harm and Purity Transgressions in Africans: A Paradigmatic Replication of Rottman and Young (2019)
(2026-01-24) Adetula, Adeyemi; Forscher, Patrick; Basnight-Brown, Dana; Wagge, Jordan; Namalima, Takondwa, Rex; Kaphesi, Frank, Ephraim; Kaliyapa, Wickson; Mulungu, Kennedy; Silungwe, Walusungu; Gopye, Polycarp, Chamkat; Malingumu, Winfrida; Azouaghe, Soufian; Alsayed, Ebaa; Ndukaihe, Izuchukwu; Kalongonda, Milton; Dzuka, Alert; Charyate, Abdelilah; Adetula, Gabriel, Agboola; Ogbonnaya, Chisom; Shanka, Mesay, Sata; Eze, Nsi; Enworo, Oko; Gold, Zione; Abolade, Saheed; Shumiye, Olawu; Primbs, Maximilian; IJzerman, Hans
Improving the generalizability of psychology findings to a culture requires sampling participants in that culture. Yet psychology studies rarely sample from African populations, even though it represents 17% of the overall world population. This study aimed to conduct an African-led replication study to test whether Rottman and Young’s “mere-trace” hypothesis of moral reasoning (that people are more sensitive to the dosage of harm-based transgressions than purity transgressions) extends to several African communities. We used a training method developed by the Collaborative Replication and Education Project (CREP) to support and train 23 African collaborators. During this process, we conducted a paradigmatic replication of Rottman’s and Young’s test of the mere trace hypothesis in Egypt, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tanzania. [We did not find/We found] evidence for the main interaction effect (bdomain x dose = xxx) of transgression severity on the moral wrongness judgment of impure and harmful violations. [We did/ However, we did not] replicate Rottman and Young's findings among Africans. This project helped improve the research capacity of our participating African sites and will support other researchers in collaborating with African scholars.
Artificial Intelligence for Aging Control: Modeling, Predicting, and Steering Cellular Lifespan
(Publisher, 2026-01-30) Barack Ndenga
Aging is traditionally characterized as an irreversible biological process driven by the cumulative accrual of molecular damage. In this article, I propose and articulate a fundamentally distinct conceptual framework: aging as a dynamical, information-driven process that can be modeled, predicted, and actively steered using artificial intelligence (AI). I position AI not as a passive analytical tool but as an enabling core technology capable of transforming aging into a controllable biological trajectory. By integrating multi-omic and multi-scale biological data, AI enables the precise optimization of the timing, sequencing, and personalization of therapeutic interventions, thereby reframing longevity science as a problem of temporal systems control. This perspective establishes a new theoretical foundation for precision geromedicine and next-generation longevity biotechnology.
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence in Aging,Aging as a Dynamical System,Closed-Loop Control Systems,Predictive Gerontology,Biological Aging Clocks,Precision Geromedicine,Longevity Biotechnology,Temporal Systems Control,AI-Driven Interventions,Multi-Scale Modeling,Personalized Aging Trajectories,Senotherapeutics,Cellular Reprogramming,Healthspan Extension,Systems Biology of Aging