Building Africa’s Open Research Infrastructure: Design, Implementation, and Impact Evaluation of a Unified Grant Marketplace, Collaboration, and Scholarly Publishing Platform

Abstract

This article examines AfrigrantPipeline as a proposed and partially implemented socio-technical infrastructure integrating grant discovery, researcher identity, collaboration, mentorship, and scholarly publishing for African research communities. The analysis synthesizes the supplied technical and pilot narrative with established open-science, FAIR-data, and African digital-transformation frameworks. Its central contribution is an integrative architecture and an explicitly testable evaluation framework rather than a demonstrated causal effect. The source manuscript describes favourable early user feedback, but does not supply the participant count, observation dates, instruments, baseline measures, or analyzable event logs required to substantiate statistical improvement. Accordingly, this expanded article treats reported experiences as provisional and specifies an ethically governed, reproducible mixed-methods evaluation for future deployment. The resulting design emphasizes discoverability, identity interoperability, accessibility, security, transparent AI assistance, and sustainable institutional stewardship.

Keywords: African research infrastructure; open science; grant discovery; research collaboration; FAIR data; responsible artificial intelligence; digital equity