IICD joins Programme to Support European-African Research Collaborations

This collaboration programme will run until December 2013. A kickoff meeting took place in France in January. In the meeting, the concrete tasks and activities were discussed aimed at answering the question: what type of ICT research should be supported by the European Union and the African Union in the future?

IICD’s task is to contribute cases and recommendations based on its partners’ experiences in Africa. “Based on its experience on the ground, IICD has networks of people in Africa who know what’s relevant locally or is likely to be relevant in the future,” says IICD’s Community Relations Manager Saskia Harmsen. IICD will also facilitate meetings that bring together research partners and ICT4D expert practitioners in order to further define the research priorities: to assess what is already happening, what the trends and gaps are, to define long-term research topics that would demonstrate value and stimulate growth in a particular domain.

The programme EuroAfrica-P8 includes research institutes and represantatives from Egypt, Finland, Germany, Kenya, The Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, South Africa and Tunisia.

Concrete outcomes from the EuroAfrica-P8 programme could be that in the future, more tailored research funding will become available. Harmsen: “Another thing we are striving towards is that research partners in Africa are more aware of existing funding opportunities for their ICT research.”