Seminar: Africa’s digital dividend - mapping the shift from tech transfer to indigenous innovation
Popular accounts of contemporary Africa south of the Sahara remain dominated by reports of disaster, disease and mayhem. While the terror attacks in Nigeria and Kenya and the Ebola outbreaks in West and East Africa demand the world’s attention, these narratives of African failure co-exist and co-evolve with emerging narratives of African success. In this ASC seminar, Gregg Pascal Zachary will chart the spread of digital technologies in contemporary Africa, describing the current shift from pure absorption of Euro-American digital technologies to the rise of home-grown, indigenous innovation activities in computing and communications. Drawing on case studies from Nairobi (mobile money) and Kampala (computer science research), Zachary will argue that the spread of Africanized digital technologies is having profoundly positive, if poorly understood, effects on African society, culture and material life.
This is an Africa Today seminar. Please note that it will not be held on our regular Thursday, but on a Monday.
Zachary has visited Sub-Saharan Africa more than forty times since 2000. He is a professor of practice at Arizona State University’s School for the Future, where he studies technology, society and innovation. He came to African affairs from the study of American politics surrounding science and the study of innovation enclaves. He is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (1997), and his writings on innovation have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine. In 2013, he received a grant from the National Science Foundation (U.S.) to study the emergence of computer science research in East Africa.
Discussant
Date, time and location
08 June 2015
15.30 - 17.00
Pieter de la Courtgebouw / Faculty of Social Sciences, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
Room 3A06
Registration
Posted on 16 April 2015, last modified on 8 June 2015