African Science, Technology, and Innovation Forum 2020

Winners of the African Science Technology and Innovation Forum 2020 Innovation in Action Competition 

The second African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum

The second Forum will be held from 24 and 25 February 2019 in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, and will be hosted by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology Development of Zimbabwe. The Forum is co-organized with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in collaboration with the African Union Commission and the Department of Science and Innovation, South Africa.

The Forum is designed to meet both the global and continental mandates. As noted above, it will serve as a platform for exploring and facilitating interactions, matchmaking, cooperation and partnerships among the relevant stakeholders, in order to drive technology development and transfer, and create regional innovation networks for co-learning and co-creation, and for sharing of experiences between and among multi-stakeholders. Further, it will also provide a platform to identify and examine technology needs and institutional voids and gaps that should be addressed to enable African countries to fully harness and deploy science, technology and innovation to accelerate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.

These include scientific cooperation, innovation and capacity-building, as well as facilitation of the development, transfer and dissemination of relevant technologies for the Sustainable Development Goals. The Forum will showcase efforts that the public, private sector and individuals deploy to accelerate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals as well as how technologies, especially technologies developed in Africa, can contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2063.

Preparations for the second African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum

The second African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum will draw lessons from the first African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum, and the organizational and structural aspects of the Multi-stakeholder Science, Technology, and Innovation Forum for the Sustainable Development Goals. In this regard, the second African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum will be held over a two-day period beginning one day before the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development, and will mobilize Member States, business leaders, academia and civil society to contribute fully and benefit from its proceedings. In this regard, a number of preparatory steps have been undertaken in building up the African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum.

Theme of the second African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum

The theme of the second African Science, Technology and Innovation Forum is drawn from the theme of the sixth session of the Regional Forum: “2020–2030: A decade to deliver a transformed and prosperous Africa through the 2030 Agenda and Agenda 2063”.

The sixth Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development will undertake a review of all 17 Sustainable Development Goals in five clusters – People, Prosperity, Planet, Peace and Partnerships – as shown in the table below.