Exploring Crowd-Based Capitalism in Africa’s Sharing Economy
The sharing economy has been growing at an ever-accelerating pace throughout the world as peer-to-peer networks and collaborative company models continue to pop up. The sharing economy, according to Rachel Botsman, is “an economic model based on sharing underutilized assets, from spaces to skills to stuff, for monetary or non-monetary benefits.” They often involve platforms that enable the exchange of services between peers or businesses. Arun Sundarajan explains the sharing economy somewhat differently: “What is new, in the “sharing economy,” is that you are not helping a friend for free; you are providing these services to a stranger for money.” He describes this as “crowd-based capitalism.”
L’innovation au service de l’informel à l’ère de la COVID-19
Par : Abdelhamid Benhmade
La COVID-19, et si nous en profitons pour renouer des liens plus étroits avec l’informel? Nombreuses sont les personnes frappées de...
Open AIR Seeks Equitable Solutions to Post-pandemic Innovation Challenges
In 2013, Open AIR published foresight research anticipating a future shaped by shocks like a catastrophic global pandemic. During the decade since, Open AIR...
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.
Africa’s Maker Movement: An Overview of Ongoing Research
Makerspaces are places where people gather to build projects, learn new technologies, and develop entrepreneurial opportunities. Open AIR is conducting research on makerspaces across the African continent.
June Open AIR Network Meeting in Cairo
When SSHRC and IDRC awarded sizeable, prestigious grants to support Open AIR in its third phase of research, the Network’s leadership promptly organized a face-to-face meeting at its North African Hub, the American University of Cairo. While a great strength of Open AIR is its ability to coordinate its research and administrative tasks remotely across its various hubs, personal meetings are invaluable when the Network needs to deal with specific overarching strategic issues.
The absence of gender analysis in AI and its implications for...
By
Akkila Thirukesan
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been an exciting tool for development across the continent of Africa. But what does AI have to do with...
The Open African Innovation Research Partnership Transition Workshop
By Dana Elbashbishy
On the 8th of February
2018, members of the Open African Innovation Research Partnership (Open AIR) gathered
in Accra, Ghana to share research...
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...
Vulnerabilities Exposed: COVID-19 and Informal Livelihoods in Egypt
By Nagla Rizk
This article was originally published by Medium
“I wish they let us move and to end the curfew, so we go to work....
