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.

Open AIR has just released a video, on our @Afrinnovation YouTube channel, highlighting the network’s current large research programme, “Regulation for Innovation Supporting Sustainable...

Funded by the Open AIR network, my case study is about skills development and innovation at Ghana’s Suame Magazine Industrial Cluster. The research I am conducting seeks to understand the processes and systems that contribute to how knowledge is or is not shared and how skills are acquired in one of West Africa’s largest informal sector industrial clusters, Suame Magazine. How skills are learned and what is communicated between those in the industrial cluster will help us to learn how innovations are shared and taught among these informal businesses.

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.

By Bertina Lou On December 8, 2023, the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was commemorated at the Advancing Health Justice...

By: Nagla Rizk AI and Gender in Africa The original version of this essay was written as a section in a paper titled “Integrating Africa...

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....

By Chris Armstrong The EU Horizon 2020-funded African European Maker Innovation Ecosystem (mAkE) Project, in which Open AIR is an African partner, has published its flagship policy...

By Lilian Nantume* The education and dissemination of knowledge about Intellectual Property Rights for small women-owned businesses in Uganda is still in its infancy. Unfortunately,...

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.