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 The British Council will this week launch Maker Faire Africa (MFA) project, which will focus on bringing together acts of ingenuity and inventions from across the continent.
The three-day event will come off August 14-16 in Accra. It will host a series of workshops, seminars and lectures focused on four key innovation areas, namely Arts and Crafts, Robotics, Agriculture and Environment, and Science and Engineering.
The aim of the project is to create space on the continent where Afrigadget-type innovations, inventions and initiatives can be sought, identified, brought to life, supported, amplified, and propagated.
This project conference will answer the question, ‘What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from across the African continent together and add resources to the mix?’
With more than 900 people expected to participate, MFA is a chance to change the conversation about Africa from development to innovation.
In Ghana, MFA will engage on-the-ground breakthrough organizations like Ashesi University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to sharpen focus on locally-generated, bottom-up prototypes of technologies that solve immediate challenges to development. Specifically, MFA will take an approach that will achieve three principal aims.
The three principal aims are “Brighten the light on local examples of the ‘fabrication’ ethos, Provide mechanisms to incubate these innovators and their products to a point where they can be taken to market; and Connect refined plans to disseminate innovations with venture finance.”
The ultimate aim of Maker Faire Africa 2009 will be to establish partnerships and an organizing infrastructure that could lead to a series of events across the continent.
No formula or single model for how this could evolve exists, and this will be part of the challenge taken up by leaders on the continent who take up the Maker Faire Africa concept.
By Fred SARPONG DAWURO-Ghana News
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