Blog Post

The Summit was part of a series of events that took place in Egypt in conjunction with the Global Entrepreneurship Week. A2K4D’s Senior Research Officer, Nagham El Houssamy, participated in the summit, speaking on the Data-Driven Innovation Panel on Friday, November 18.

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.

By Chidi Oguamanam Buoyed by the July 2022 WIPO 62nd General Assembly decision that endorsed a Diplomatic Conference on Genetic Resources (GR) and Associated Traditional...

By Chris Armstrong The African European Maker Innovation Ecosystem (mAkE) Project, of which Open AIR is part, has launched its Open Catalogue of Business Models (OCBM)....

Please note that this call for applications has now expired.  Applications are not being accepted at this time. Funding to conduct research on gender and...

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...

Researchers from the Open African Innovation Research (Open AIR) network have been awarded almost CAD 750,000 for a new three-year research project, Catalyzing AI’s Potential in Africa...

Back in October 2016, three of our Open AIR Research Fellows had the unique and rewarding opportunity to participate in the Second Annual Institute of African Studies Undergraduate Research Conference at Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies. Undergraduate researchers from across the globe presented their research findings on a wide breadth of topics – from fiction describing Nigerian culture, to professional development for youth in South Africa, to political structures that influenced the welfare state in Tanzania and Kenya.

By Esther Ekong Africa is making her way fearlessly into the global center stage as new models of innovation, aiming to not only address the needs of...

Le travail panafricain comprend plusieurs défis, entre autre la grandeur du continent, sa diversité, les différences juridiques, et la complexité des langues. Les défis sont particulièrement marqués pour l’innovation africaine. Il y a deux organismes régionaux dans le domaine de la propriété intellectuelle, en plus de l’Organisation mondiale de la propriété intellectuelle, ce qui souligne la diversité et les divisions linguistiques et régionales. Pour Open AIR, un réseau de recherche qui travaille dans de différents domaines de l’innovation et la propriété intellectuelle, on rencontre plusieurs défis à cause de cette diversité.