This year’s seminar builds on the 2016 ISC science-for-development seminar, which helped to advance the agenda for Europe-Africa cooperation, especially in the science field. The 2017 seminar – which again looks at science and innovation in the context of development – comes two months ahead of the AU-EU Summit in Ivory Coast. The summit’s theme is ‘youth’, a shared priority for both continents.

ISC’s seminar on 27 September 2017 will assess policy options for building up science capacity in Africa, with a view to addressing the global challenges set out in the UN SDGs. Debate will centre round ways to promote an enabling policy and regulatory environment which can facilitate the sharing of data and knowledge between key users in Europe and Africa.

Much of the seminar will be devoted to recent innovations in both continents, in both space and Big Data. Participants will discover just how these innovations can play complementary roles in addressing some of the challenges of the UN SDGs – including economic growth and societal transformation leading to more and better jobs.

The seminar will feature presentations of relevant research infrastructure and examples of capacity building to achieve the SDGs, covering several major Europe-Africa initiatives and shared issues. Among them are the African Data Intensive Research Cloud (ADIRC), which is led by South Africa; a debate led by University College Dublin on pressing common challenges and how innovation can support agriculture and food security; and the Irish contributions to international projects, such as LOFAR (Low-Frequency Array) radio telescope and the Square Kilometre Array.

Participation in the seminar is free of charge. Registration is available here.

For more information, please contact:

Declan Kirrane, ISC Intelligence in Science

Email: declan.kirrane@iscintelligence.com, tel: + 32 494 34 60 40