? 15-19 June 2020
Online forum
The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and its partners are inviting to the COVID-19 Innovation and Investment Forum 2020. This online Forum will showcase Africa’s innovation and production potential, promote knowledge exchange and information exchange, link investors and innovators as well as facilitate collaboration and technology partnerships.
Specifically, it will bring together innovators, investors, government officials and researchers to showcase their innovations and strategies as well as identify innovation gaps, investment needs, and industrial opportunities. There is an increasing recognition that most national healthcare infrastructure and medical supply chains are more vulnerable to shocks than previously thought. Countries that have developed and retained domestic capabilities to produce their own supplies (e.g. German and Korea) have surfed the COVID-19 induced global shortages of medical supplies better than those with deep pockets but dependent on international suppliers.
While Africa, like the rest of the world, have celebrated the novel designs of a wide range of medical products, very few are likely to enter the market and even fewer are likely to remain in the market past the COVID-19 pandemic. It is for this reason that Africa should mobilize resources (i.e. financial, technical, human, business etc) to support burgeoning innovation and entrepreneurial talent to seed start-ups, support SMEs and invest in research and development to enhance the resilience of its domestic capacity to respond to current and future disasters.
The Forum will serve as a platform for interrogating some of these issues, stimulating public and private sector development and for forging global partnerships and collaborations. Specifically, the Forum will focus on the following areas:
- Affordable rapid testing;
- Enhance medical devices and personal protection gear design and production
- Improve efficiency and effectiveness of contact tracing and isolation
- Strengthen the capacity to develop and produce drugs and vaccines
- Government led innovation to ensure key services are delivered safely (remote learning, service delivery etc…)
Original source: UNECA
Published on 28 May 2020
