Invention in Africa: Open AIR shares its Model at CAAS 2019
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...
El Houssamy Presents at Egypt Entrepreneurship Summit
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.
Open Data and Ownership at the Global Open Data for Agriculture...
By Jeremy Baarbé
(Picture: courtesy of Drawnalism)
Open data has the potential to end global hunger. Farmers, government ministers, NGOs, and private firms gathered to collaborate...
OPEN AIR AND QES FELLOW EXPLORED THE IP, TK AND GENDER...
By Desmond Oriakhogba
Gender issues are increasingly being discussed with regard to intellectual property (IP) and traditional knowledge (TK), especially from an African innovation perspective. Generally,...
The Blue Economy and The Need for Open IP
By Eashan Karnik, cross-posted from Smart Prosperity Institute
The need to adopt clean energy technologies is a pressing issue not
just in Canada, but internationally...
Open AIR initie un débat intra-africain sur l’informel à l’ère de...
Par Abdelhamid Benhmade
En collaboration avec le Centre de recherche en droit, technologie et société (CDTS), DST/NRF/ Newton Fund Trilateral Research Chair in Transformative Innovation, et,...
WIPO IGC 39: Unraveling the Tiered Approach to TK/TCEs
By Chidi Oguamanam
One of the major innovations of the IGC, in its long-running search for international legal instruments for the effective protection of TK/TCEs...
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...
Innovation by “makers” in South Africa’s Gauteng Province
The “Makers” who come together to tinker and hack in the maker collectives of South Africa’s Gauteng Province display a wide range of innovation practices, our research for Open AIR has found.
Our study, Collaboration and Appropriation in Gauteng Makerspaces, investigated the activities of eight Gauteng maker collectives. The findings have now been published in Open AIR Working Paper 6, entitled The Maker Movement in Gauteng Province, South Africa.
Challenging the Meaning of Innovation: Lessons from Refugee-Founded Organizations in Kampala
There is often a limited and constricted view of African innovation, especially when it comes to refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). While there is the common perception that refugees on the continent are resilient, innovative, and resourceful, it is only in the sense that “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Too often, refugees and IDPs are perceived as persons with only needs. The reality is that refugees and IDPs are just like everyone else and bring many skills, ideas, and innovations to the global marketplace, both the marketplace of ideas and of goods.











