Blog Post

This fall, two Open AIR New and Emerging Researchers Uchenna Ugwu and Sileshi Hirko successfully defended their PhD theses at the University of Ottawa. Food...

Looking back at Open AIR’s ‘Making’ Innovation Happen roundtable By Sean Boots In mid August, Open AIR hosted a roundtable discussion on makerspaces and innovation hubs in...

On 10 June 2015, the Agreement establishing a Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) was signed in Egypt bringing together 26 African countries from three major regional blocs: the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Following the signing, the current phase of the TFTA negotiations are meant to cover five agenda items: trade in services, cooperation in trade and development, competition policy, intellectual property (IP) rights, and cross-border investment. The fourth of those five issues was the subject of the second Open AIR East Africa Distinguished Speaker Series presentation by Dr. Henry Kibet Mutai.

Par Abdelhamid Benhmade En réponse à l’invitation de Cités et Gouvernements Locaux Unis d’Afrique (CGLU Afrique), j’ai eu la possibilité d’assister à la 8èmeédition du...

Par Aboubacry Kane Aujourd’hui, les femmes entrepreneures sont de plus en plus présentes sur la scène économique au Sénégal. Bien qu’elles s’engagent dans des activités entrepreneuriales, souvent de petite taille,...

The World Intellectual Property Organization’s specialist committee charged with negotiating text-based instrument(s) for the effective protection of Genetic Resources (GRs), Traditional Knowledge (TK), and Traditional Cultural Expressions (TCEs), on Friday June 16 2017 concluded its 34th session with partial agreement on its mandate and on the fate of the committee and its work program.

In October 2010, Yoweri Museveni, the President of Uganda, recorded a rap song titled: "Do You Want Another Rap?" as part of his re-election campaign to capture the imagination of young voters. The song was a huge success and may have played a part in his reelection. When Museveni applied for a copyright registration of the song, however, members of the Ankole community filed an objection stating that the song was derived from Ankole folklore. While the Registrar of Copyrights in Uganda eventually allowed Museveni's copyright application for registration, this case triggered Dr. Anthony Conrad K. Kakooza's interest in the area of traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) and whether TCEs should be recognized within the domain of intellectual property (IP) law.

Photo credit: Image by Ville Oksanen via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) By Chidi Oguamanam, cross-posted from ABS Canada. After six days of deliberations (June 24-29, 2018) to secure...

In the first week of April 2016, the Open African Innovation Research and Training (Open AIR) network held a three-day workshop at our Nairobi hub, Strathmore University. The workshop included the Open AIR team and was primarily organized to bring together all the successful case study researchers in order to review, refine, and brainstorm about their upcoming research. There was also significant activity on Twitter, which can be read about here. All the case studies that Open AIR is funding fall under at least one of our major research themes: high technology hubs, informal sector innovation, indigenous entrepreneurship, and metrics and policies.

By Dr. Otitodiri Ogadinma OnyemaQES Postdoctoral Fellow, Centre for Law, Open AIR In October, 2025, I had the privilege of presenting my research at the International Conference...