Depicting Reality in the African Context
By Menna Badreldin
It is challenging to quantify a phenomenon in the same method across countries. Indices are generally a tool to represent a certain...
Is Creativity and Innovation All About Intellectual Property?
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.
OMMIC: A Personal Perspective
By Uche Ajuonuma
Last fall, I attended the Ontario Makers and Mentors Innovation Conference (OMMIC) at uOttawa. The event was held at the new STEM...
À la découverte de la « Darky » : une imprimante 3D fabriquée au...
Par Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou
La difficulté d’accès à l’équipement est souvent pointée comme l’un des principaux problèmes dont souffrent les makerspaces en Afrique. Et...
Makerspace Sustainability: mAkE Project Launches Open Catalogue of Business Models (OCBM)
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)....
Egypt’s New Investment Law: Creating Better Opportunities for Small Businesses?
By Sarah El Saeed
The Egyptian Government has begun in pushing through a fiscal and monetary reform plan that includes various unpopular austerity measures. In...
Contributions des markers d’ici et d’ailleurs à la lutte contre la...
Par Ahou Rachel Koumi et Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou
Ceci constitue la deuxième partie d’une série de trois. Pour la première partie, cliquez ici. La...
Lords of the Platforms: Beyond Banning Twitter, What else Should Nigeria...
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...
Reconciling Intellectual Property Rights and African Development: The Right to Development...
By Uchenna Felicia Ugwu
In September 2017, the Thabo Mbeki Foundation and the Centre for Human Rights (CHR), Faculty of Law University of Pretoria gathered together...
WIPO Expert Committee on Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Traditional Cultural...
By Chidi Oguamanam
For the 35th time in 18years, experts have yet again gathered at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) headquarters in Geneva where...













