Partners and Sponsors

Organisations, institutions and initiatives sponsoring and supporting (or contributing to) the African DSI DataBank.

Partnership and sponsorship types

The platform's real, current gaps double as the clearest description of what a partner or sponsor could actually contribute:

Infrastructure & hosting — Compute for real protein-structure-prediction workloads (this platform's ESMFold integration point is a pluggable stub until a real inference backend is funded) and object storage at scale as the federated catalog grows.

Persistent-identifier sponsorship — A DataCite consortium-lead relationship would let this platform mint real, registered DOIs instead of today's stable-but-unregistered AFDSI-* local handles — researched at roughly €2,200-2,700/year for a consortium covering multiple African institutions.

Preservation & succession — A dark-archive partner and a formal succession agreement, so the catalog survives beyond any one institution's own operational lifetime — see docs/PRESERVATION_AND_SUSTAINABILITY.md, which states plainly that neither exists yet.

ABS / Nagoya-compliance services — A real access-and-benefit-sharing verification service this platform can call — its own ABS client is a documented, pluggable interface that stays inert until one is configured, by design: this platform calls a third-party service and stores its answer, it never adjudicates compliance itself.

Node-operator institutions — Hardware, bandwidth, and local IT capacity to run a Spoke, National, or Sub-regional Hub node — see docs/NODE_OPERATOR_HANDBOOK.md's own sizing guidance for what that actually takes.

Funder & policy engagement — Support for the platform's own fifth roadmap priority — engaging African countries and policymakers toward a permanent AU-level DSI institution — the one priority this platform can only supply evidence for (see /participation), not implement directly.