I am today participating in the Europe-Africa concertation meeting. This meeting is organized by the START IST, project.
The START program is a specific support action within FP6 for promoting to get Subsaharan African Organizations into the FP7 Framework programs. There are 1 European and 2 African Partners in Start. It is a 2 years program and they will publish in October 2007 a strategic Framework.

The meeting was started by a presentation of Thierry Devars the project officer from the International Relations Unit, DG Information Society and Media, European Commission. Devars pointed out that with the 7th framework all research institutions in subsaharian African countries are eligible to participate and to be funded in framework projects. (this is true also for the countries around the Mediterranean, India, China, Russia and some other countries)
He emphasized that China and India are investing huge sums and initiatives into research collaboration with Africa and that Europa risks to loose the train.

Another Key Note Speaker was Daan du Toit, South African Science and Technology Representative to Europe. He wanted to bring an African Prospective into the workshop. He pointed to the planned January 2007 summit on “Science and Technology and Innovation” between African governments that will discuss a consolidated plan of action with regard to Capacity Building, Knowledge Production and Technological Innovation. He pointed out that there is still more a research divide than a digital divide. Research cooperation for Africa is essential to link to the 99% of research produced outside Africa. Europe is the most important partner, but he sees this collaboration as a win-win collaboration.

In both presentations it was emphasized that we are speaking not about development projects but about common research projects.

25 projects are being presented at this meeting, including projects on cultural heritage, e-commerce, Health, Physics and Mathematics, but it seems upto know that my presentation is the only one referring to Agriculture. Here is a huge task for FAO!

Important Highlights

- The IST Africa conference in May 2007 in Mozambique
- The elearning Africa initiative, which organized a meeting with 800 participants in 2006 in Addis Abeba. The 2007 workshop will take place on May 28 in Nairobi, Kenya
- the C@R project, this is a knowledge exchange platform for rural lifelihoods, which is developed as 6th framework project under participation also of Brazilian and Chinese partners.
- Erol Kulahci from the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie reported about the huge distance and eLearning programs of the Agence together with African institutions. He presented a digital Campus at the University of Ougadougu.
- Mmboneni Muofhe from the South African Government presented ESASTAP European Southafrican Science and Technology Advanced Participation Program. This seems to be an important means in developing the collaboration between SA and the EU. SA has a quote of 0.7% spending of the GDP for R&D and wants to raise this to 1%.
- Stephane Boyers from the W3C gave a presentation about developing mobile web applications (using on the mobile phone) because this is the most important way on bridging the rural digital divide.
- David Dickson from SciDevNet: ICTs have a keyro to lpay in disseminating scientific Results. Dossier on Agri-Biotech . They give access to Science and Nature articles free (2 a week)
-several speakers empahasiced the importance of "open access" and "open source". These are becoming paradigms for projects financed by the EU.

The full program of the meeting is attached to this blog, also my presentation.presentations