2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT
The “2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT” (an event designed to anyone with an interest in Euro-African collaborative project on ICT) was held on November 28-29, 2012, at the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) in Lisbon, Portugal. The event has been organised by the EuroAfrica-ICT/P8 EU/FP7 funded project in the framework of the EuroAfrica-ICT Initiative and with the support of the National Science Foundation (FCT) of Portugal. This major event was the fifth of a series of very successful conferences organised by the EuroAfrica-ICT Initiative under the aegis of the European and the African Union Commissions (EC & AUC):
#1: March 25-26, 2009 – Brussels, Belgium
#2: February 4, 2010 – Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
#3: December 7-8, 2010 – Helsinki, Finland
#4: November 14-15, 2011 – Cape Town, South Africa
Organised in the framework of the Africa-EU Strategic Partnership (JAES) and hosted by the Government of Portugal through the Ministry of Education and Science (MEC), this 5th Forum edition mainly aimed at strengthening and supporting the development of cooperation on ICT research and ICT4D between Africa and Europe.
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The “2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT” was an event filled with discussions and debates, networking opportunities and knowledge sharing among key stakeholders in the field and policymakers coming from all over Europe and Africa. The Conference represented a unique opportunity for all parties interested in the ICT domain to:
The Forum featured various session types:
Over 200 European and African key stakeholders in the field (coming from Institutions, National and International Companies, SMEs, Academia, Research institutes, etc.) were expected to participate in the conference. Among them: Policy-makers | Senior representatives from Governments | Representatives from international development cooperation agencies | ICT project managers | Programme managers | Heads of research labs | Researchers | IT engineers | Deans, directors, lecturers and researchers from universities and the higher education sector | Managers of NGOs, professional associations, centres of excellence, trade unions, chambers of commerce, etc. | Industry stakeholders | etc. |
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The ‘2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT’ provided event sponsors with major visibility, significant networking opportunities and substantial benefits prior to, during and after the event. Sponsorships helped the organisers to ensure a larger participation of high-level delegates from Africa (mainly speakers) by offering them mobility grants covering part of their travel and subsistence expenses.
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The European Expert Group of the Partnership 8 (the so-called EEG8) is the European sub-group of the JEG8 and and feeds its meetings.
The EEG8 next meeting was be co-located with the ‘2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT’ and took place on November 27, 2012. The African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) group together individual countries in subregions for the purposes of achieving greater economic integration. They are described as the ‘building blocks’ of the African Union (AU) and are also central to the strategy for implementing the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). RECs representatives met on November 26, 2012, at the initiative of the AUC and with the support of the EuroAfrica-P8 Partnership. The AXIS (“African Internet Exchange System” focuses on enhancing Internet deployment and use in Africa) Steering Committee met on Nov. 27, 2012. Organized by the AUC with the support of the EuroAfrica-P8 Partnership, this meeting was restricted to the AXIS steering Committee members. The Coordination Action BIC project co-located their annual International Advisory Group (IAG) meeting (by invitation only) on 27th November 2012 in the morning, and their open forum workshop in the afternoon on ‘Building International Cooperation for Trustworthy ICT: Security, Privacy and Trust in Global Networks & Services’. Organised by the BIC project, this open workshop (held between 14:00-18:00) aimed at bringing together researchers and programme managers to explore how best to organise future International cooperation (INCO) research activities within trustworthy ICT and its supporting programmes and elaborating the key challenges, issues and priorities that must be addressed jointly by the global community. More information is available here. The P8/ICT multi-stakeholder Implementation Group (IG8/ICT) of the “Africa-EU Strategic Partnership on Science, Information Society and Space” co-chaired by the EC and the AUC is formed to provide key stakeholders active in the information society areas with periodic opportunities to meet, network, exchange views, develop collaborative work, agree on common action plans, launch consultations, etc. The P8/ICT Implementation Group (IG8/ICT) is expected to gather ICT representatives from European and African Member States (MS), the Regional Economic Communities (RECs), the research community, the private sector, the civil society and NGOs, the international financial institutions and the international organisations with the main objective of facilitating cooperation and a better coordination of national and regional programmes, as well as identifying concrete initiatives of mutual interests in support of EU and AU priorities. The IG8/ICT meeting has been co-located with the ‘2012 Africa-EU Cooperation Forum on ICT’ and took place on November 30, 2012. |
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The event took place at the Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB) located between Jéronimos Monastery and Belém Tower in Lisbon, Portugal. This unique congress centre is the ideal structure to host all kind of business, scientific, commercial, cultural and social events. Centro Cultural de Belém |
