Innovation Centers in Africa

I am very interested in Innovation Centres and LABs and have been exploring and also visiting some in different countries. Lately, my focus has been in Africa. A lot has been written about the boom of innovation centres in Africa, but recently mHealth Africa published a great infographic that shows all those hubs on the continent. 
Some of them are already in the interactive Planet for Change MAP and we hope to add more in the next days.

Many of the innovation hubs are connected in AfriLabs, a network organization that seeks to build on this common vision and further promote the growth and development of the African technology sector.

What is AfriLABS?

 AfriLabs builds on a common vision to promote the growth and development of the African technology sector.

Members of AfriLabs hubs have already come together successfully in their bid to implement the U.S. Department of State sponsored contest Apps4Africa. AfriLabs members have also worked to establish the Hive Colab as Kampala’s leading open collaboration space and successfully tendered to host the infoDev sponsored mobile apps lab in East Africa. AfriLabs by virtue of its on-the-ground engagement and local ownership is uniquely positioned to be a catalyst for the sector.

AfriLabs builds on these early successes and from the ground up, the entrepreneurs using the spaces and the labs that service them set the mandate. This ensures that Afrilabs remains grounded by the labs knee-deep in the business and builds on the experience in each of their localities. AfriLabs sets out with the following objectives:

1. Discover synergies between the labs
2. Share best practices and help new organizations emerge
3. Enhance visibility of the network and her actors, share success stories
4. Organize networking events and facilitate other exchanges, both online and offline
5. Secure resources for the network by establishing a revolving fund
6. Generally promote developments in this space and explore other common interests.

Reinvent Africa by mHealth Africa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.