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The paper argues for the development of open science in Africa as a means of energising national science systems and their roles in supporting public and private sectors and the general public. It focuses on the complexity of the social and economic challenges created by climate change and the demographic explosion and the difficulty of confronting them in the absence of an adequate digital infrastructure. Although a well-coordinated, federated multi-state open science system would be a means of overcoming this barrier, African science systems largely operate independently of each other, creating siloes of incompatible policies, practices and data sets that are not mutually consistent or inter-operable. Africa's linguistic chasms of English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and indigenous languages create further barriers. As international science moves towards greater openness and data sharing to address the complexity inherent in major global challenges, Africa's stance needs radical overhaul. The paper draws on the questionnaire data from 15 African Science Granting Councils and the state-of-the-art Report to them on "Open Science in Research and Innovation for Development in Africa". It concludes that a well-developed Open Science system for Africa, would develop and enhance collaborations and partnerships among Africans to tackle the challenges that they face and accelerate innovation and development.

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This paper highlights approaches for smallholder engagement, identifies key barriers to participation, and outlines options to enhance farmers’ agency.

Background: This paper presents the processes carried out to be able to develop/gather the complete and right requirements to developing a secure and effective blockchain system for the vaccine supply chain. The paper hence presents the requirements elicitation activity of the Blockchain web/mobile application for vaccine supply chain. Methods: A mixed-methods methodology was applied. The methods employed were; document review, survey, focus group workshops, interviews, observation, brainstorming, brainwriting Unified Modeling Language and system dynamics. Results: The paper present results of each of the methods used in requirements elicitation for eight themes, namely: temperature monitoring; quality, suitability and capacity of transport facilities; information systems and supportive management functions; storage quality, suitability and capacity; maintenance of cold-chain equipment; vaccine distribution; vaccine management policies and stock management. The results presented gave understanding of the operation of the existing vaccine supply chain and the requirements for the blockchain web/mobile application for vaccine supply chain.  Conclusions: The requirements for the development of the desired vaccine supply chain web/mobile application were captured and documented.