To stimulate development and innovation across Africa, an ‘African Technology Development and Transfer Network’ should be created.

This was the proposal of Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) executive secretary Vera Songwe, in her opening address at the fourth Africa Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Forum, held in Kigali, Rwanda, recently. The ECA is an agency of the United Nations (UN).

“We need to build sound scientific, technological and innovation foundations to enable STI to deliver,” she affirmed. “As we have witnessed recently, many of our countries needed support to build capacities to test for Covid-19. As global supply chains collapsed, Africa’s over-reliance on imported medical supplies left the continent vulnerable in many aspects, and Africa was forced to innovate.”

The creation of such a pan-African STI network could, she stated, “identify emerging technologies, anticipate needs and encourage the sharing of knowledge” across Africa. It could be central to spreading technologies to African small and medium-sized enterprises.

The Africa STI Forum was created to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and as part of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. A multistakeholder collaborative initiative, it is organised by a UN inter-agency task team on science, technology and innovation for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

“[T]his congregation of some of Africa’s best and experienced minds will find ways in which Africa can deploy science and technology to meet these goals in less than a decade,” highlighted Rwandan Education Minister Valentine Uwamariya. The forum took place alongside the eighth Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development.

“We need cooperation between countries for Open Science,” pointed out UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) Eastern Africa director Hubert Gijzen. “This is why Unesco launched the First International Open Science Framework, which 193 member States have approved.”