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

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Now showing 1 - 5 of 7

Recent Submissions

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From 8 000 “Criticals” to Fewer Than 200: Five Years of Pathway-Aware Risk Prioritisation in Enterprise Vulnerability Management
(CEMA-USK, 2025-11-20) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi; Ipoli, Christian
Security operations teams are overwhelmed by alerts and routinely wrestle with backlogs of several thousand “critical” vulnerabilities, yet still experience serious incidents and rising analyst burnout. During the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic this became particularly visible: attack surfaces expanded overnight through remote access, while staffing levels and attention were under pressure. This article describes five years of experience with a pathway-oriented, open-standard risk prioritisation model deployed in several Tier-1 European organisations in financial and automotive sectors. Instead of relying primarily on scanner-provided severity (for example CVSS-based critical/high/medium/low buckets), the model ranks issues according to their role in concrete attacker pathways: how they enable entry, lateral movement and impact on critical assets. Our research offers three main contributions. First, we detail a natural experiment during the first COVID-19 wave where an automotive finance subsidiary, using shared infrastructure, reduced over 6,000 scanner-critical items on its remote-access estate to zero pathway-critical issues in under six months. This occurred despite increased remote-work exposure and attack volume, and without successful compromise, unlike branches on the same infrastructure using traditional CVSS prioritization, which suffered incidents. Second, we generalize this, showing five large organizations reduced top-priority items by over 90% (from ~8,000 to <200) without compromising security outcomes. Third, these reductions were achieved within formal governance frameworks (documented plans and architectures) that have since been formalized into open, vendor-neutral standards now being reused in Europe and African/EMEA markets.
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DSM-H as an African-Born Global Framework for Structural Pathology
(CEMA-USK, 2025-10-02) Nsiangani, Kibavuidi
The DSM-H (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Human Structural Pathologies) proposes a new way to name harms that do not live inside one person’s “mental disorder” but arise from stable patterns of institutional behaviour. It concentrates on structurally anti-human behaviour clusters (SAHBC / O-SAHBC) that generate preventable damage in health, justice, administration and other vital systems. This paper places DSM-H in an African psycho-political lineage (Fanon, Amos Wilson, Kimbangu) and within the broader MEN-D work on linguistic colonisation, epistemic warfare and digital harassment. It argues that DSM-H is a logical next step in that lineage: an African-born, globally usable system that treats structural pathology as something observable and measurable, independent of what institutional actors claim to feel or intend. Whether an institution “means well” comes second. What matters first is the pattern of decisions and their consequences for human lives. We outline the core DSM-H architecture: the Nsiku–Nzola–Bisalu ethical training triad and the MOYO indicators (MOYO-S, a probability scale for life-aligned behaviour, and MOYO-MBI, an index of life deviation and harm). We show how these tools convert African epistemic concepts (Nsiku, Nzola, Bisalu, mbi) into operational metrics. DSM-H starts its testing in the hospital, where structural cruelty cannot hide behind rhetoric, then moves outward to any context where power, reward and identity combine to normalise injury. DSM-H does not depend on voluntary confession by institutions or professionals. Diagnosis proceeds from pattern and consequence, not from declared motive. This avoids the familiar situation where those who benefit from structural harm can block its naming. DSM-H is built as a protective instrument for populations, with Africa as its starting point and any context of oppression as its horizon. Oppressive systems often recycle the same behavioural templates. DSM-H formalises a safeguard against those templates, from an African vantage point.
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The Octet Rule Revisited: A Quantum-Continuum Framework for Chemical Bonding
(Publisher, 2025-11-24) Barack Ndenga
The octet rule is ubiquitously taught as a universal principle of chemical stability, yet it is fundamentally a pedagogical approximation that breaks down across vast regions of chemical space. Hypervalent molecules (e.g., SF₆, PCl₅), electron-deficient systems (e.g., BF₃), transition-metal complexes, and metallic clusters all violate the rule in systematic and predictable ways. Despite this, no unified framework has reconciled these deviations with the underlying quantum-mechanical continuum of electronic interactions. Here, we propose a fully modern quantum-continuum interpretation of chemical bonding based on electron-density topology, multi-center bonding models, and the interplay between orbital energetics and electron correlation. This framework demonstrates that “octet violations’’ are not anomalies but natural consequences of delocalization, symmetry, and energy minimization in many-electron systems. By replacing the rigid octet paradigm with a continuous, energy-driven model, we resolve the apparent contradictions between introductory rules and real chemical behavior. Keywords Octet rule; hypervalent molecules; electron deficiency; quantum continuum model; QTAIM; ELF; multi-center bonding; chemical bonding theory.
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Bio-Adaptive Quantum Error Correction: Immune-Inspired Priors Enable 22–65% Overhead Reduction in Surface-Code Decoding
(Publisher, 2025-11-22) Charles L. Crawley II¹,Jorel Robinson², Barack Ndenga
Fault-tolerant quantum computation remains severely constrained by decoding overhead. Conventional minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM) applied to the rotated surface code achieves a pseudothreshold of approximately 1.04% under circuit-level depolarizing noise, but only at the cost of substantial classical processing and qubit overhead. Here we introduce the first quantum-error-correction decoder that directly incorporates priors inspired by the human adaptive immune system. By using the empirically measured length distribution of T-cell-receptor (TCRβ) CDR3 regions as a Bayesian prior over error-chain plausibility, we modify PyMatching’s edge-weight model to obtain a 22% improvement in pseudothreshold on a distance-7 rotated surface code (100,000 shots per point). We further introduce a biologically motivated clonal-expansion mechanism: a cache of high-confidence syndrome–correction pairs that can be recalled in O(1) time when near-recurrent error patterns appear. Under temporally correlated (1/f-type) noise, this mechanism yields an additional 28–43% reduction in logical error rate, corresponding to total overhead reductions of 45–65% relative to MWPM. All code is open-source (MIT license) and fully reproducible in <10 minutes on free Google Colab. These results demonstrate that biological fault-tolerance architectures encode computational principles with direct applicability to quantum hardware, opening a new direction for bio-inspired quantum error correction.