Blog Post

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...

How can farmers and researchers use open data to work together for food security? Open data and other forms of open access to knowledge help facilitate these relationships.

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...

How the world evolves in the next decade (and beyond) may be dependent upon a new-age movement re-instilling age-old skills: the maker movement. In my ongoing research into the maker movement in Canada and South Africa (see earlier posts here and here), I recently co-hosted a workshop in Ottawa with attendees from the University of Ottawa, representatives of makerspaces in the community, and those with knowledge about makerspaces elsewhere in the world.

Enthusiasts and researchers gathered on Friday, March 3, 2017 to share research on the growing African maker movement. The workshop was hosted at the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation at the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa.

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...

By Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou Du 6 au 10 mai 2018, la ville de Dakar accueillait le Festival Afropixel 6 sur la thématique « Utopies non-alignées :...

By Eslam Shaaban   For decades, Kodak was a global giant in the photography industry all over the world. Over the past decade, however, their...

By Desmond Oriakhogba Recently, Open AIR participated in a workshop which focused on the integration of gender perspectives into research projects aimed at promoting social...

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.