Blog Post

Our Open AIR researcher Dr. Erika Kraemer-Mbula is continuing her exciting research in South Africa about informal sector entrepreneurs. Informal entrepreneurship is receiving increasing scholarly and political attention in Africa. The continent’s booming youth population calls for an unprecedented need to create income and livelihood opportunities. Besides the traditional focus on formalisation, there is a growing interest in understanding the creative processes and innovations occurring in informal enterprises. However, evidence remains scarce, and research on informal enterprises still represents a relatively new and unexplored frontier.

By Bertha Vallejo and Erika Kraemer-Mbula Dr. Bertha Vallejo is an OpenAIR QES fellow with the University of Johannesburg. She analyzes the adoption of Industry...

Mr. Sileshi Hirko, a PhD candidate in the Common Law Section of the University of Ottawa, has won the Civil Society Scholars Award (CSSA)....

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...

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 Akkila Thirukesan This blog is part one of a series into Akkila’s during her visit to Open AIR’s South Africa hub – the...

By Mnena Abuku Pottery is an ancient art in Nigeria and is practiced in different parts of the country. It has high value for the tourism industry...

By Olanrewaju A. Fagbohun, Ph.D, SAN In charting a future course where the goal is about equitable and democratic end to fossil fuel production, we...

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...

By Uchenna Felicia Ugwu Achieving global food security will require innovation. Processes like plant phenotyping and technologies like digital imaging are examples of innovation that...