The Sudan Open Archive was launched in Nairobi in May 2006 at the Africa Workshop of the UN Humanitarian Information Network. A new version, redesigned and enlarged, went online in January 2007.

The Archive is an expanding, open-access digital Library developed and maintained by the Institute, covering all aspects of Sudan. It offers full-text word-searching, with documents downloadable as pdf files. The Archive is also available as a disk-based application.

The first phase of the Archive involved the digitisation of documents from two decades of emergency aid programmes under Operation Lifeline Sudan. Further reports and books on environmental issues have recently been added. These will be followed by literature on local peace processes, ethnography and indigenous languages. The Archive will link to a new version of the RVI guide to Sudan Internet Resources.

In January 2007 the Rift Valley Institute opened offices in Kenya and in the United States. The Kenya office is located in Nairobi, in the premises of the British Institute in Eastern Africa. The US office is on the campus of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The UK office of the Institute is in Central London.

A series of specialist meetings on policy in the Horn of Africa is taking place during 2007 and 2008 at Chatham House in London (the Royal Institute of International Affairs). The meetings are jointly organised by Chatham House, the Rift Valley Institute and the Royal Institute of African Affairs. The first publications arising from the series are Ethiopia and Eritrea: Allergic to Persuasion by Sally Healy and Martin Plaut and The Rise and Fall of Mogadishu’s Islamic Courts by Cedric Barnes and Harun Hassan.

The Institute was co-sponsor of an international conference on China-Africa relations, held in Cambridge, UK in July 2006. The conference was a two-day, multidisciplinary examination of Chinese approaches to Africa, including papers on the history of China’s relations with Tanzania and Sudan.

The Institute has updated its 2005 report on local peace processes in Sudan, commissioned by the UK Government Department for International Development. Local Peace Processes in Sudan offers an analytical account of the growth of "people-to-people" peace meetings in Sudan and its borderlands. The 2006 version of the report includes an expanded bibliography and up-dated time-chart of peace meetings over the last two decades in Southern and Northern Sudan, including Darfur and the transitional zone between North and South. Full-text versions of the reports cited in the bibliography will be incorporated into the Sudan Open Archive.

The Sudan Abductee Database is the outcome of an eighteen-month field investigation in Bahr-el-Ghazal, Southern Sudan. The initial version of the Database was launched in 2003. A revised and updated version was made available in 2005. The investigation was designed to create a record of persons missing, abducted, enslaved or killed during the civil war in Southern Sudan during raids on Dinka, Luo and Fertit communities by Murahaliin - tribal militias operating out of Government-controlled areas of the North. RVI researchers recorded the full names, identifying characteristics and close kin of more than 10,000 individual abductees.