Kigali– Africa’s cluster of Innovators and seekers to some of the major challenges facing the continent will meet in Kigali from 6-8 June, 2018 at the Kigali Convention Center as they seek to find solutions to these challenges.
This year’s summit will focus on innovative and disruptive solutions to the major challenges facing African countries, which include energy access, water, food insecurity, health systems, and governance. As a platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue and actions.
The summit aims at creating a community of innovators that will not only meet to dialogue on solutions but also create a community ecosystem that will enable them to share ideologies beyond the summit.
Dr. Olugbenga Adesida, co-Director of AIS, indicated that “AIS provides more than a robust and dynamic platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue, but rather a catalyst for “Made in Africa” innovations that are already addressing the challenges faced on the continent, but need assistance to take root and scale across the continent.
A selected group of 50 innovators from 44 African countries will have a unique opportunity to engage stakeholders in discussing potential solutions to some of the blockages that are preventing solutions from going to scale.
Innovation has been cast to help African countries in building bridges for more inclusive ecosystems that can accelerate and scale innovation across all levels of society.
The summit will begin with an exhibition at the Kigali Cultural village where
Under the patronage of His Excellences President Paul Kagame and Pedro Pires (ex-President of Cabo Verde), brings together stakeholders from all parts of the continent with the power to act.
AIS II will bring together people from all parts of the continent and elsewhere, including Heads of State and Governments, Ministers, corporates, innovators, investors, policy makers and academics, researchers, as well as policy, science and technology experts, with the aim of building robust ecosystems for innovation in Africa to ensure Africa’s structural transformation.
ABOUT 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.
