This piece by Walter Bgoya and Mary Jay details efforts to free indigenous African publishing from "the constraints of the colonial past, the strictures of economic structural adjustment policies, the continuing dominance of multinational publishers (particularly in textbooks
Angela Okune: Sulaiman Adebowale notes the challenge of ensuring a journal's sustainability and thinks aloud about different ways that could be possible:
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AO: I developed this instrument in preparation for a discussion about Open Access on the continent. Thank you to K. Meagher, L. Chan, and K. Fortun for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this instrument. I did not end up following the questions closely as we ran out of time (...Read more
AO: This quote (see copy-pasted below) states that IBM (Research) believed that "many of the hardest problems in our world today, particularly in Africa, are problems of information." The speaker...Read more
AO: This MIT Technology Review post describes the machine learning community on the continent and places companies like IBM front and center of these "blossoming" communities. There is an important critical labor and tech training component to be unpacked here.
The article quotes...Read more
0:02 CTO, IBM Watson We're very glad to be here in Africa. As you know, late last year, we opened our 4th research lab in IBM, here in Africa. And Africa represents to us an incredible, very exciting set of opportunities. And that's for many reasons, okay, not the least of which is the African...Read more
In this interview, Adebowale mentions NGOs becoming an alternative space for African scholars to do research and produce knowledge because of the state disinvestment in education and...Read more
The opening (copy-pasted below) from this IBM Research keynote talk by the CTO of Watson outlined why IBM has an optimistic view for "Africa" - because of projected growth in labor and...Read more
AO: This article (from September 2020) notes that despite a narrative that heavily circulated early in the global spread of the COVID pandemic that "vulnerable" and "high-risk" places, in Africa for example, were going to be devastated by COVID, it has not in fact played out that...Read more