This presentation makes the following case: that the world has changed over the past two decades, and while traditional tools of librarianship may have sufficed in the past, there is an urgent need for librarians to embrace open licences, open education resources, open access publications, open data, and open science. Each of these five major parts of the open ecosystem will be discussed, with a focus on how African librarians can learn about and adopt open practices for their own use and that of their clients.