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Mozambique: UniLúrio among winners of the Knowledge Exchange Awards 2020
9:52 CAT | 30 Jun 2020
Photo: O País
Lúrio University (UniLúrio) was awarded at the Knowledge Exchange (KE) Awards 2020, as part of the ‘Best Team of Year’ for its initiative to augment the impact of knowledge generated by universities in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), through academia-industry partnerships.
Co-recipients of the ‘Best Team of Year’ award are the University of Cambridge, the Botswana Institute of Research and Technological Innovation, Cambridge Enterprise and the University of Namibia.
“Addressing the need to build R&D and technological capacity in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, this initiative defined Academia-Industry knowledge-exchange structures and practices conducive to local prosperity,” the initiative’s website reads.
“Advancing such Academia-Industry innovation ecosystems is also important for UK HEIs seeking to deliver impact in these regions: as reviews of Newton Fund and GCRF grants note, failure to address innovation diffusion in ODA-target countries is a major obstacle to achieving the funding goals conducive to local prosperity,” the same source adds.
The international knowledge-exchange team from the UK, Botswana, Mozambique and Namibia co-created and delivered the initiative – convening over fifty contributors from ten research institutions and seventeen actual SADC knowledge-exchange cases on aquaculture, agriculture, water treatment, conservation, climate change and tech and indigenous knowledge-based approaches to health.
The programme was initiated by a workshop in Botswana that defined infrastructure and policy priorities for the efficient identification, protection and application of promising SADC innovations and for the creation of local human, social and cultural capital. Relevant expertise was identified around the political economy of technical innovation, industrial policy for development, open research tools and IP models for societal impact and SADC research institution have since strengthened their knowledge-exchange offices, supported inventors around commercialization and established entrepreneurship training. This, in turn, drove a second workshop in Cambridge focussing on commercialization and knowledge-exchange practices and established a basis for the implementation of the numerous SADC-Cambridge collaboration identified opportunities – namely around microbial and electrochemical energy production systems and on water remediation. The initiative’s innovative design also motivated consultation from Innovate UK around the delivery of Africa KTN and has already been deployed elsewhere.
The knowledge exchange team continues to act as a network for the implementation of UK-SADC collaborative research projects that respond to development needs of Southern Africa and for the championing of knowledge-exchange models that can adequately respond to the development priorities of the region.
Source: O País /www.keawards.org.uk
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