Headlines: Africa on track to malaria milestone, Novartis releases child friendly antimalarial, global community redoubles efforts to eradicate polio, African initiative launched to fund local health research in Kenya and Malawi, delegation visits East Africa to explore partnerships, Coca-Cola commits $30 million for clean water in Africa, promising results for women’s microbicide gel, African entrepreneurs promote sustainable sanitation solutions. Continue reading
Tag Archives: African Innovation
Intellectual Property Rights For Africa
In Africa, ingenuity abounds. But the intellectual property rights designed to protect that ingenuity often don’t. Less than one percent of patent applications globally are from Africa.
If Africa is a well-spring of innovation, why doesn’t it protect its inventions? The answer is complex, and largely the result of a number of factors: under funded research institutions, cultural practices, lack of legal services and clogged governmental IP structures. Continue reading
African Entrepreneurs Promote Sustainable Sanitation Solutions
Three social entrepreneurs from Africa were in Washington, DC, in February to promote their creative – and lucrative – solutions to some of Africa’s most intractable sanitation problems.
The three – Kenyan David Kuria, Nigerian Joseph Adelegan and South African Trevor Mulaudzi – have each identified a problem in their communities and set about finding a solution based on a business model rather than turning to aid or public funding. Their innovations are successfully changing social behavior and improving public health, the environment and the economy. Continue reading
Powering Africa
By Meg Dallett
It’s no surprise that Africa’s chronic power supply problem is bad for business. The World Bank has started adding up just how bad it is, though, and the results are staggering-Uganda alone loses $50 million annually from distribution and transmission problems on its electrical grid. Continue reading
Making Everyone Part of the Solution
Recently, Reuters reported that worldwide cutbacks driven by the financial crisis could undo Africa’s hard-earned gains in income and health. The crisis has caused private equity to dry up, leaving little available for crucial development work. If the world does not act now, tens of millions of people in Africa will fall into poverty again. Continue reading
Remittances With Ring Tones
By Meg Dallett
Only ten percent of people who receive remittances have bank accounts, but 86 percent of them have cell phones. That’s one of the reasons why companies like MTN and Zain are introducing mobile banking services, where people can use their phones to pay bills, make withdrawals, or send money. Continue reading
Bottom of the Pyramid Builds the Bottom Line
Bottom of the pyramid strategies (BOP), where companies reach huge markets by selling inexpensive products designed for living conditions in developing countries, are helping companies like Coca Cola and Standard Chartered Bank better weather the global recession. And true to the BOP model, success in emerging markets is transforming into innovation in developed markets as consumers face constrained cash flows and demand more value per unit purchased. Continue reading
Good vs. Bad Middlemen
People always ask me what I think is the key to economic development in Africa. Usually I focus on two challenges: getting capital in the hands of African entrepreneursand building infrastructure to reduce the cost of doing business on the continent. Lately, I have added a third: the lack of middlemen in the right sectors and the proliferation of them in the wrong sectors of African business. Continue reading
Africa Health News November-December 2008
Search engine company Google announced in October that it awarded grants of more than $14 million to support researchers in Africa and Southeast Asia who are working to prevent the next pandemic. The initiative, known as Predict and Prevent, will be part of a global effort to identify hot spots where diseases may emerge, detect new pathogens circulating in animal and human populations, and respond to outbreaks before they become global crises. Continue reading
