OpenAIR

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 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.

The decentralised project is administered from the University of Cape Town's IP Law and Policy Research Unit, with management support from faculty affiliated with the University of Ottawa's Centre for Law, Technology and Society. The project’s funding is from Canada’s IDRC and Germany’s BMZ. The project’s capacity-building component is being carried out in cooperation with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), through its initiative entitled "commons@ip – Harnessing the Knowledge Commons for Open Innovation."

Open A.I.R. is building on the success of the earlier African Copyright and Access to Knowledge (ACA2K) project, with many Open A.I.R. Team members having worked on ACA2K.