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The Albertine Rift is one of the global hotspots for biodiversity. The region has over 50% of bird species, 39% of mammals, 19% of amphibians, 12% of known beneficial insects (pollinators) and 14% of reptiles and plants of mainland Africa. However, the threat to biodiversity in the region is alarming. It is estimated that the annual rate of species disappearance is approximately 1.4%.One of the root causes to this problem is the lack of effective mechanisms to share existing data and information using agreed standards to ensure inter-operability, and the capacity to collect, digitize, analyze and interpret the information in a meaningful format for a wide range of audience including, governments, non-governmental organizations, schools, media, etc. To address this issue, ARCOS has developed an initiative termed “ARCOS Biodiversity Information Management System – ARBIMS”. This initiative aims to facilitate biodiversity data management, sharing and reporting in the Albertine Rift region as well in other ecosystems of focus for ARCOS namely the Great Lakes freshwater ecosystems and African Mountains. In 2012, ARCOS conducted a regional biodiversity data holding assessment where various institutions and data holders in the region were contacted and the data held in their custody were scrutinized to assess the possibility for data harmonization and establishment of a common data management system.The analysis showed that not much data exists in the region but the most challenging situation is that even the little data available is not in digital format, and there is a significant lack of consistency in the existing datasets where various institutions use various taxonomic standards making it difficult to harmonize this data.With funds from the JRS Biodiversity Foundation, ARCOS embarked on a data mobilization scheme where a herbarium in Eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) is being supported to digitize its specimens and a data centre in Uganda was helped to publish data on the Albertine rift to GBIF.So far, a regional portal using GBIF’s Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT) has been developed and data holders are currently being encouraged and motivated to share data relevant to ARCOS’ ecosystems of focus.One of the lessons learned is the fact that regional initiatives are crucial in mobilizing data on transboundary ecosystems and the use of common standards is an important aspect to achieving this. Also, we call upon international standardization bodies such as TDWG to consider more dimensions of biodiversity data beyond species occurrences and checklists.