The AIS

The AIS is an Africa-wide and home grown initiative aimed at harnessing the innovation potential of the continent. It aims to mobilize the people and, especially those with the ‘power to act’, including investors, the people with the ideas, the policy makers, the researchers and academics, the business community, the youth, as well as innovators and thinkers into a coalition for collective action to promote and build an enabling environment for innovation in Africa. The goal is to engage as many people as possible in order to build a broad constituency in support of innovation in Africa. The basic fact is that Africa cannot outsource its development.

The AIS platform includes regular Summits to promote dialogue, facilitate exchange of best practices among stakeholders and African countries, showcase what is happening on the continent, and share lessons of experience. The platform also includes engaging with African researchers and scholars to undertake case studies to tease out lessons of experience in order to facilitate learning by stakeholders. The African Innovation Exhibit which is also part of the AIS provides a stage to showcase homegrown innovations and innovators on the continent, while the Hackathons will challenge the people to come up with solutions to specific problems. The exhibitions and hackathons will allow stakeholders to seek ways to scale up potential solutions.

Each AIS will build on the previous ones by deepening the dialogue, engaging a wider number of stakeholders, as well as by focusing Africa’s innovation potential to address the challenges facing the continent. The aims are to identify path breaking ideas and disruptive solutions to be developed and/scaled up in Africa as well as build a constituency to help address the fundamental challenges facing the continent.

Why AIS?

Addressing the fundamental challenges facing the continent will not happen through a laissez-faire agenda and, more importantly, Africa’s structural transformation and sustainable development will only happen if African countries are able to build innovation-driven economies and societies. This is a pre-requisite in the emerging world, with accelerating pace of change and hypercompetitive economy, in which the only competitive advantage, according to Aires de Geus, is the ability to learn faster than one’s competitors.

African countries must transform and diversify their economies through value addition to primary commodities, efficient resource consumption, the use of low-carbon energy forms and services, and the development of services sector. Innovation is the single most important prerequisite for this to happen. Innovation must become a way of life on the continent. Through innovation, Africans can develop the solutions to address the developmental challenges such as poverty, health, energy, water, productivity, competitiveness, economic diversification, food security, climate change and governance facing the continent. The AIS aims to serve as a key platform to promote innovation in Africa.