Central to the development endeavours of countries of the Greater South is building knowledge-driven societies and economies. As set out by the Secretary-General, H.E. Manssour Bin Mussallam, during an OSC sideline event at INGSA 2024 in Kigali, Rwanda, back in May this year, this requires a purposeful drive towards the democratisation of knowledge at three levels:

• Nature: promoting the fruitful encounter of all sources of knowledge, from academia to endogenous knowledge domains;
• Economics:advancing the rights to the equitable access to knowledge, research funding, and innovation dividends; and

• Geopolitics: embracing plurality in the production of knowledge through greater visibility, mobility, and multilingualism in research.

In the context of these goals, and having been mandated to serve as a neutral knowledge-broker, the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC) has developed the Greater South Information System (GreSIS), a free, open-source digital platform aimed at:

• Democratising Access: by providing a fast-growing database of academic resources and endogenous knowledge to institutions across the South;
• Facilitating Collaboration: by making research from the South more visible across Member States and providing instantaneous translations of all resources in Arabic, English, French and Spanish, with a 90 to 95% accuracy through Artificial Intelligence; and
• Fostering Transdisciplinarity: by enabling stakeholders to “look up” and “link up” knowledge from across disciplines and revalorising endogenous knowledge as an integral part of the platform.

Launched in February 2024, the GreSIS Beta version currently hosts over 280,000 resources, to meet the needs of researchers, educators, students, policymakers, and practitioners across the Greater South. The platform is on track to reach 1 million resources by December 2024, and is open for institutional enrolment across the 28 OSC Member States and Associate Members.

As an integral part of these knowledge democratisation efforts, a GreSIS Information Webinar was hosted by the OSC and the All-Africa Students Union (AASU) on 12 July, providing an introduction to the platform, featuring guided presentations, platform walkthroughs, and reflections on the significance of GreSIS. Participants were also provided further information on how to “Join GreSIS” through institutional enrolment, “Contribute to GreSIS” as authors, and “Connect” as knowledge-seekers through the platform.