Research

By Charlotte Galvani and Jeremy de Beer Negotiations toward a new international treaty on pandemic preparedness and response have failed to reflect a rights-based consensus...

By Esther Ekong As part of its Solutions for Gender Equality speaker series, The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), hosted a special panel...

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...

Authored by: Ola Mirzoeva This Working Paper 33 explores the potential for space-based technologies to support African agricultural productivity and to address economic transformation hindered...

Principal Investigators:  A/Prof. Dick Kawooya, School of Information Science, University of South Carolina, USA, Kawooya@sc.edu    A/Prof. Tobias Schonwetter, Department of Commercial Law, University of Cape Town,...

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 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.”

Edited by: Chidi Oguamanam. When the oral history of a medicinal plant as a genetic resource is used to develop a blockbuster drug, how is the contribution of Indigenous Peoples recognized in research and commercialization? What other ethical, legal, and policy issues come into play? Is it accurate for countries to self-identify as users or providers of genetic resources?

By Outlwile Maselwanyane  The first gathering for Africa Open Science & Hardware (AfricaOSH) was hosted by Kumasi Hive innovation hub, Kumasi, Ghana, on April 13-15...

On 10 June 2015, the Agreement establishing a Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) was signed in Egypt bringing together 26 African countries from three major regional blocs: the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Following the signing, the current phase of the TFTA negotiations are meant to cover five agenda items: trade in services, cooperation in trade and development, competition policy, intellectual property (IP) rights, and cross-border investment. The fourth of those five issues was the subject of the second Open AIR East Africa Distinguished Speaker Series presentation by Dr. Henry Kibet Mutai.