Blog Post

Agricultural data is a vital resource in the effort to address food insecurity. This data is used across the food-production chain. For example, farmers rely on agricultural data to decide when to plant crops, scientists use data to conduct research on pests and design disease resistant plants, and governments make policy based on land use data. As the value of agricultural data is understood, there is a growing call for governments and firms to open their agricultural data.

With the world on edge as the COVID-19 crisis progresses, the scientific community has sprung into gear in search of an effective treatment. Research and Development (R&D) is progressing at unprecedented speeds. Amidst this rapid development, traditional knowledge plays a significant role in scientific endeavours. Through traditional knowledge, medical researchers can gain guidance and inspiration and bypass prolonged and expensive scatter-gun approaches to R&D.

By Vanessa Turyatunga Language shapes and reveals aspects of different cultures and identities. Through my Masters’ work on Yoruba religion, it has become evident to...

By Jeremy de Beer and Yvonne Ndelle The recent conference hosted by the Canada Africa Parliamentary Association (CAAF) served as a pivotal platform for discussing...

On 10 December 2016, as part of the RiseUp Summit in Cairo, Open AIR’s North Africa hub hosted their first Distinguished Speaker event with Ibrahim Al-Safadi, the CEO of Luminous Education. The Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) invited Al-Safadi to speak about the role of “makerspaces” to tackle unemployment and to share his experiences in how to create a makerspace that ensures that the individuals involved end up with jobs.

By Jake Okechukwu Effoduh Several reports on States’ adoption of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) across the world have indicated that African countries have a “slow” or...

By Michael Dao On March 28th, 2019, the University of Ottawa hosted the Shifting Horizons: Managing Your Research Data Conference, a day-long series of workshops for researchers. I...

By Charlene Musiza The marketing of traditional cultural expressions (TCEs) – which are manifestations of traditional culture such as handicrafts, sculptures and performances – presents...

By Adedamola Adediji It’s a flattened world! An offshoot of this is that political discourse, commercial transactions, and economic activities have mainly moved online. This...

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.