Speaker
Description
The Fifth Industrial Revolution (5IR) offers Africa an opportunity to drive digital transformation by centering people, indigenous knowledge, and inclusive innovation. Yet African biodiversity, cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge, and locally generated research remain fragmented across repositories, museums, libraries, and community collections, limiting discoverability, interoperability, attribution, and equitable participation in global knowledge ecosystems. The Africa PID Alliance addresses this challenge through DOCiD™ (Digital Object Container Identifier), an African-owned persistent identifier infrastructure that connects the complete lifecycle of research, innovation, biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, and cultural heritage. Unlike conventional persistent identifiers that identify individual digital objects, DOCiD™ employs a multilinear container architecture to link publications, datasets, museum collections, audiovisual materials, herbarium specimens, patents, funding records, researchers, institutions, projects, and communities within a single persistent, interoperable ecosystem. Built on open standards and FAIR principles, it complements existing PID infrastructures while strengthening African data sovereignty, provenance, and long-term preservation. As a digital public infrastructure for 5IR, DOCiD™ advances open science, interdisciplinary collaboration, ethical governance of indigenous knowledge, and AI-ready metadata. By preserving relationships between knowledge assets, it improves research discoverability, supports research-to-policy and research-to-market pathways, and safeguards ownership, consent, attribution, and community authority. Growing institutional engagement including collaborations with Stellenbosch University, North-West University, Rhodes University, and the Kenya Libraries and Information Services Consortium (KLISC) demonstrates increasing demand for African-owned PID infrastructure. The paper argues that Africa's digital transformation requires infrastructures designed around African priorities, positioning DOCiD™ as a strategic enabler of trusted, discoverable, protected, and reusable knowledge for sustainable scientific, social, and economic development.