Blog Post

By: Nagla Rizk AI and Gender in Africa The original version of this essay was written as a section in a paper titled “Integrating Africa...

by Mohamed Hosny In the past few years, there have been several initiatives to help entrepreneurs introduce new creative and innovative products that break from...

By Nicole Tumaine Over the past four months, I have had the privilege of attending three international conferences as a panelist thanks to the generous...

In the recently concluded ‘African Ministerial Conference: Intellectual Property for an Emerging Africa’ organized in part by WIPO (here), one cannot help but think that all roads leading to creativity and innovation are paved with intellectual property (IP) laws and institutions. Put differently, the level of creativity and innovation in a society is dependent solely on how we tinker with and enforce IP laws. This ‘IP parochialism’, as I call it, is manifest in the conference program. Of course, the response would be that the conference was solely about IP and as such there was no need to look beyond IP. This is an erroneous view.

Par Abdelhamid Benhmade En quatre semaines, la situation est devenue extrêmement alarmante sur le continent africain. « Les populations africaines vivent l’un des pires épisodes pandémiques...

By Outlwile Maselwanyane  The first gathering for Africa Open Science & Hardware (AfricaOSH) was hosted by Kumasi Hive innovation hub, Kumasi, Ghana, on April 13-15...

By Chidi Oguamanam, cross-posted from ABS Canada Last Meeting on the GR Text Under the 2022-23 Biennium May 30-June 3, 2022: Delegates met in-person and virtually...

By Uchenna Felicia Ugwu Africa is becoming recognized as an important hub of informal innovation, which should not be excluded or ignored by formal systems for IP...

Earlier this year, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a two-day workshop on “Supporting Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises Use the Intellectual Property System in Their Competitive Strategy” at the Academy of Scientific Research and Technology in Cairo, Egypt, which some of our Open AIR NERG members attended. The goal of this meeting was to discuss how to encourage young innovators to protect their inventions by patenting them at the Egyptian Patent Office. The workshop had vibrant and sometimes heated discussions between these innovators and government officials regarding many of the obstacles faced in the patenting process in Egypt.

Introduction In 2020, Ethiopia, a country that has faced a refugee crisis primarily because of long-term conflicts, experienced a deadly war that displaced many Ethiopians...