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Open A.I.R.'s North African Hub joins the global Network of Internet & Society Centers

Open A.I.R.'s North African Hub, the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D), has joined the global interdisciplinary Network of Internet & Society Centers (NoC). NoC is a collaborative initiative among academic institutions with focus on interdisciplinary research on the develop

Director of Open A.I.R.'s North African Hub Addresses WIPO South-South Meeting

Prof. Nagla Rizk, Director of Open A.I.R.'s North African Hub, the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at The American University in Cairo (AUC), gave a talk on 8 May 2013 at the WIPO Second Inter-Regional Meeting on South-South Cooperation in Cairo. Rizk addressed a session entitled "IP Rights, Infringements and Enforcement: Accounting for Socio-Economic, Technical and Development Variables, including in the Context of Recommendation 45 of the WIPO Development Agenda".

Ethiopia's Society for Technology Studies (STS) Launches Newsletter

Ethiopia's Society for Technology Studies (STS), led by Open A.I.R. researcher Wondwossen Belete, has launched its newsletter. The inaugural edition, dated March 2013, is attached to this post, and it carries a report on the Open A.I.R.-STS workshop on IP from publicly funded researched convened at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Addis Ababa in December 2012.

Update on Proposed Pan-African Intellectual Property Organisation (PAIPO)

Open A.I.R. South Africa research team member Dr. Caroline Ncube of the University Cape Town has published her views on the current status of the African Union's (AU's) proposed Pan-African Intellectual Property Organisation (PAIPO). The item, carried on the Afro-IP website, is entitled "PAIPO is Dead. Long live PAIPO".

The Open A.I.R. Project

The Open African Innovation Research and Training (Open A.I.R.) Project is investing in pan-African research, networking, capacity-building and policy engagement.

The project’s central aim is to investigate how intellectual property (IP) regimes can be harnessed in Africa to facilitate innovation through collaboration – and through making processes more participatory, knowledge more accessible, and benefits more widely shared. Interconnected, empirical case studies are now underway, exploring a range of research questions in countries across the continent.

The case studies are connected to six Open A.I.R. themes: copyrights, patents, trademarks, the WIPO development agenda, the traditional knowledge (TK) commons and IP from publicly funded research. At the same time, the project is conducting foresighting research to develop scenarios for the future of IP, collaboration/innovation and development in Africa. Later in the project, training, capacity-building and policy engagement activities will be rolled out, based on the case study and foresight findings.