Representatives from the APDA Global Young Leaders' Course during their presentations to the Asian and Arab parliamentarians, with Dr Hanna Yoon, who led the first youth course. Credit: APDA

By Erin Lee, Jayun Choi, Seungeun Lee and Chaeeun Shin
Seoul, South Korea, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

Whether you look at society, the environment, or technology – the world is changing rapidly. Global organizations strive to adapt to this change. The United Nations, for example, has developed the Sustainable Development Goals as a blueprint for human development.

Youth must and should be at the forefront when tackling the changing world. Consequently, a socially literate, educated generation equipped to tackle these challenges is crucial, and many institutions are taking up this challenge.

The APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course is one such initiative. It has just completed its first year, supported by UNFPA, IPPF, and AFPPD.

The program’s founder Dr Hanna Yoon says future societal issues will be complex and multifaceted.

She wanted “to create a program where young leaders could learn to explore the relationships between two seemingly unrelated ideas.”

APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course participants learned new skills during the inaugural course. The participants, who are all at school, were required to create projects which would benefit people and the planet. Credit: APDA

Yoon devised the Leaders’ Course to help students develop skills to assist them in dealing with diversity. The course curriculum brought them in contact with unique ideas and perspectives, leadership through teamwork, and the ability to solve problems.

The program effectively combines a holistic curriculum and active learning techniques. APDA’s holistic curriculum, which featured ten different experts, seeks to prepare students for the multicultural societies of the future.

Dr Helen Lee taught students about the design thinking process, which they would later utilize in their projects.

Dr Osamu Kusumoto, APDA’s secretary-general, spoke about population issues.

Students learned how to initiate and manage innovative startups from Semoon Yoon from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The vice executive director of Okayama University, Professor Mitsunobu Kano, introduced solutions that use medical care for social issues.

Farhana Haque Rahman, senior vice president of IPS, encouraged the students to write journals and spoke about the role of media in contemporary society.

Dr David Smith, associate professor, Anglia Ruskin University, lectured on the correlation between ethnicity and inequality in global health.

Siobhán Tracey from Concern Worldwide Korea informed the students about the cause and impact of hunger.

UNFPA regional advisor Dr RintaroMori gave a lecture on aging and low birth rate.

Kevin Sanjoto, the group CEO at Alfabeta, taught about the fourth industrial revolution with its components of artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and more, which can solve social problems.

Finally, Mr Saroj Dash, the director of the international programs of Concern Worldwide Korea, taught about climate-smart agriculture.

The course also featured various active learning opportunities, which prompted students to develop their knowledge and skills. They participated in discussions, carried out group activities, and gave presentations based on what they — and their teammates — had learned.

These problem-solving activities encouraged students to explore the material on their own. They based their learning on the design thinking process, which allowed students to consider a fundamental problem and independently create a solution.

It also ensured that students had room to develop their perspectives about what they had learned. These varying viewpoints could then be shared and improved as the students worked together.

APDA’s active, interdisciplinary approach sets it apart from the other programs.

It pushes students to challenge their pre-existing beliefs and understand the nuances behind various social issues. It also provides students with the right tools to harness the information they learned.

This process has helped us uncover our potential as the leaders of the 21st century.

At the end of the course, the future leaders presented at a youth forum. The teams then spoke to parliamentarians about the proposals they had been developing throughout the course. The students joined teams based on their interests in the global issues identified.

These issues included technological inequality among different social classes, another was negligent/careless littering, and a third was an uninformed citizenry.

The first team spoke about utilizing technology to empower social minorities and resolve poverty.

Their presentation included proposals like involving the youth in smart agriculture.
The second team discussed ways to reduce littering while increasing recycling. They introduced an application that utilizes collective intelligence to map out trash cans in public spaces.

The third and final team spoke about the need for an information-sharing system between government departments and firms. They used the Australian precedent to support their views on sharing health information.

Moreover, they devised a plan to call on the youth to combat the older persons’ issues with internet technology.

After the presentation, teams answered questions and debated their ideas with Arab and Asian parliamentarians.

The open discussion ranged from general feedback and questions of how to encourage the youth to participate in parliaments to specific inquiries regarding several policies proposed by the teams. Delegates also asked the students to collaborate with the youth in their countries.

Students eagerly responded to their offers, hoping to maintain a close and steady relationship in the future.

• This opinion editorial was written by the APDA Global Young Leaders’ Course students. The writers are all school-going pupils selected by their schools. This is the first in a series of opinion editorials written by participants on the 2021 course.
• Editing: Dr Hanna Yoon

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A cow being milked by a milking robot. Photo courtesy of Cornelia Flatten.

By Friday Phiri
BONN, Germany, Aug 23 2016 (IPS)

She is only 24 and already running her father’s farm with 110 milking cows. Cornelia Flatten sees herself as a farmer for the rest of her life.

“It’s my passion,” says the young German. “It is not just about the money but a way of life. My dream is to grow this farm and transform it to improve efficiency by acquiring at least two milking robots.”

A graduate with a degree in dairy farming, Cornelia believes agriculture is an important profession to humanity, because “everyone needs something to eat, drink, and this requires every one of us to do something to make it a reality.”

Simply put, this is a clarion call for increased food production in a world looking for answers to the global food problem where millions of people go hungry. And with the world population set to increase to over nine billion by 2050, production is expected to increase by at least 60 percent to meet the global food requirements—and must do so sustainably.

While it is unanimously agreed that sustainability is about economic viability, socially just and environmentally friendly principles, it is also about the next generation taking over. But according to statistics by the Young Professionals for Agricultural Development (YPARD), agriculture has an image problem amongst youth, with most of them viewing it as older people’s profession.

For example, YPARD says half of farmers in the United States are 55 years or older while in South Africa, the average age of farmers is around 62 years old.

This is a looming problem, because according to the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), over 2.5 billion people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. In addition, for many regions of the world, gross domestic product (GDP) and agriculture are closely aligned and young farmers make considerable contributions to the GDP from this sector. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, 89 percent of rural youth who work in agriculture are believed to contribute one-quarter to one-third of Africa’s GDP.

Apart from increasing productivity, leaders are tasked to find ways of enticing young people into agriculture, especially now that the world’s buzzword is sustainability.

“It’s time to start imagining what we could say to young farmers because their concern is to have a future in the next ten years. The future is smart agriculture, from manual agriculture, it’s about producing competitively by not only looking at your own farm but the larger environment—both at production and markets,” said Ignace Coussement, Managing Director of Agricord, an International Alliance of Agri-Agencies based in Belgium.

Speaking during the recent International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) Congress discussion on sustainable solutions for global agriculture in Bonn, Germany, Coussement emphasised the importance of communication to achieve this transformation.

“Global transformation is required and I believe communication of agricultural information would be key to this transformation to help farmers transform their attitude, and secondly push for policy changes especially at government level,” he said.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), creating new opportunities and incentives for youth to engage in both farm and non-farm rural activities in their own communities and countries is just but one of the important steps to be taken, and promoting rural youth employment and agro-entrepreneurship should be at the core of strategies that aim to addressing the root causes of distress of economic and social mobility.

Justice Tambo, a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Development Research of the University of Bonn (ZEF), thinks innovation is key to transforming youth involvement and help the world tackle the food challenge.

With climate change in mind, Tambo believes innovation would help in “creating a balance between production and emission of Green House Gases from Agriculture (GHGs) and avoid the path taken by the ‘Green Revolution’ which was not so green.”

It is for this reason that sustainability is also linked to good governance for there has to be political will to tackle such issues. According to Robert Kloos, Under Secretary of State of the Germany Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, “It is true that people are leaving their countries due to climate change but it is not the only problem; it is also about hunger…these people are starving. They live in rural underdeveloped areas of their countries.”

“Good governance is a precondition to achieving sustainability,” he adds, saying his government is working closely with countries in regions still struggling with hunger to support sustainable production of food.

Alltech, a global animal health and nutrition company, believes leadership has become a key ingredient more than ever to deal with the global food challenge.

“Business, policy and technology should interact to provide solutions to the global food challenge of feeding the growing population while at the same time keeping the world safe from a possible climate catastrophe,” said Alltech Vice President, Patrick Charlton.

Addressing the IFAJ 2016 Master class and Young Leaders programme, Charlton added that “If the world is to feed an increased population with the same available land requires not only improved technology, but serious leadership to link policy, business and technology.”

But for Bernd Flatten, father to the 24-year-old Cornelia, his daughter’s choice could be more about up-bringing. “I did not pressure her into this decision. I just introduced her to our family’s way of life—farming. And due to age I asked whether I could sell the farm as is tradition here in Germany, but she said no and took over the cow milking business. She has since become an ambassador for the milk company which we supply to,” said the calm Flatten, who is more of spectator nowadays on his 130-hectare farm.

It is a model farm engaged in production of corn for animal feed, while manure is used in biogas production, a key element of the country’s renewable energy revolution. With the services of on-farm crop management analysis offered by Dupont Pioneer, the farm practices crop rationing for a balanced biodiversity.

But when all is said and done, the Flattens do not only owe their farm’s viability to their daughter’s brave decision to embrace rural life, but also her desire to mechanise the farm with smart equipment and technology for efficiency—an overarching theme identified on how to entice youths into agriculture.

During re:publica 2015, Juliet Wanyiri (centre), illustrates a practical workshop organised by Foondi*, of which she is founder and CEO. Credit: re:publica/Jan Zappner

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Jun 26 2015 (IPS)

In a major paradigm shift, the German government is now placing its bets on digitalisation for its development cooperation policy with Africa, under what it calls a Strategic Partnership for a ’Digital Africa’.

According to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), “through a new strategic partnership in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), German development cooperation will be joining forces with the private sector to support the development and sustainable management of Digital Africa’s potential.”

“Digitalisation offers a vast potential for making headway on Africa’s sustainable development,” said Dr Friedrich Kitschelt, a State Secretary in BMZ, noting however that this “benefits all sides, including German and European enterprises.”

Broad consensus about the overlap between public and private interests in attaining sustainable development goals was apparent at two high-profile events earlier this year – the annual re:publica conference on internet and society, and BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference, both held in Berlin."Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships” – Muhammad Radwan of icecairo

In Berlin for re:publica 2015 in May, Mugethi Gitau, a young Kenyan tech manager from Nairobi’s iHub, an incubator for “technology, innovation and community”, delivered a sharp presentation titled ‘10 Things Europe Can Learn From Africa’.  “We are pushing ahead with creative digital solutions,” said Gitau, delivering sharp know-how and hard facts.

The Kenyan start-up iHub is a member of the m:lab East Africa consortium, the region’s centre for mobile entrepreneurship, which was established through a seed grant from the World Bank’s InfoDev programme for “creating sustainable businesses in the knowledge economy”.

In turn, m:lab East Africa is part of the Global Information Gathering (GIG) initiative, which was founded in Berlin in 2003 as a partnership of BMZ, the German Federal Enterprise for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The m:lab East Africa consortium has spawned 10 tech businesses which have gone regional, and boasts a portfolio of 150 start-ups, including Kopo Kopo, an add on to the M-Pesa money transfer application which has scaled into Africa, the PesaPal application for mobile credits, the Eneza ‘one laptop per child’ project, and locally relevant rural applications such as iCow and M-Farm which help farmers keep track of their yields and cut out the middleman to reach buyers directly.

“We are by nature a people who love to give, crowdsourcing is in our genes, our local villages have a tradition of coming together to help each other out, so it’s no wonder we have taken to sharing and social media like naturals,” Gitau told IPS, mentioning the popular chamas or “merry-go-rounds” whereby people bank with each other, avoiding banking interest costs.

Referring to the exponential tide of 700 million mobile phone users in Africa, which has already surpassed Europe, Thomas Silberhorn, a State Secretary in BMZ, told a re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information projects in developing countries: “This is a time of huge potential, like all historical transformations.”

The pace and range of innovative mobile solutions from Africa has been formidable. The creative use of SMS has enabled a range of services which enable urban and, significantly, rural populations to access anything from banking to health services, job listings and microcredits, not to mention mobilising “shit storms” against public authority inefficiencies.

However, the formidable pace of digital penetration has raised concerns about the “digital divide” – the widening socio-economic inequalities between those who have access to technology and those who have not.

Increasingly a North-South consensus is growing concerning three core aspects of digital economic development – the regulation of broadband internet as a public utility; the sustainable potential of mobile technology and low price smart devices to bring effective solutions to a whole gamut of local needs; and the need for good infrastructure as a precondition for environmental protection and as the leverage people need to lift themselves out of poverty.

New models of development cooperation, technology transfer and e-participation governance are emerging in response to the impact of digitalisation on all sectors of society and service provision in areas as disparate as they are increasingly connected including health, food and agriculture – access to education, communication, media, information and data and democratic participation.

“Tackling the digital divide is crucial,” said Philibert Nsengimana, Rwandan Minister of Youth and ICT, addressing BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference. “It encompasses a package of vision, implementation and much needed coordination among stakeholders.”

Rwanda, which now boasts a number of e-participation projects such as Sobanukirwa, the country’s first freedom of information project, is committed to universally accessible broadband and is rising to the forefront of Africa’s power-sharing technical revolution. 

The most active proponents of the e-revolution argue that digitalisation also offers the possibility to place governments under scrutiny and have leaders judged from the vantage point of e-participation, open data, freedom of expression and information – all elements of the power-sharing models that have seen the light  in the internet age.

“Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships,” said Muhammad Radwan of icecairo.

The icecairo initiative is part of the international icehubs network, which started with iceaddis in Ethiopia and icebauhaus in Germany.

The icehubs network (where ‘ice’ stands for Innovation-Collaboration-Enterprise) is an emerging open network of ‘hubs’, or community-driven technology innovation spaces, that promote the invention and development of home-grown, affordable technological products and services for meeting local challenges.

The network is enabled by GIZ, a company specialising in international development, which is owned by the German government and mainly operates on behalf of BMZ, which is now intent on using a “digital agenda” to guide German development cooperation with Africa.

“Let us take digitalisation seriously,” said Kitschelt. “Let us use the potential of ICT for development, address the digital and educational divide and build on that resourcefulness in our partnerships by advocating for digital rights and engaging in dialogue with the tech community, software developers, social entrepreneurs, makers, hackers, bloggers, programmers and internet activists worldwide.”

Kitschelt’s words certainly found their echo among African e-revolutionaries whose rallying cry has moved forward significantly from “fight the power“ to “share the power”.

However, while this may be well be what the future looks like, there were also those at the re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information who wondered about priorities when Silberhorn of BMZ told participants: “”The fact that in many development countries we are witnessing better access to mobile phones than toilets is a clear catalyser for changing development priorities.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

*  Foondi is an African design and training start-up that focuses on creating access to open source, low-cost appropriate technology-related sources to leverage local technologies for bottom-up innovation. It provides a platform for problem setting, designing and prototyping entrepreneurial-based ventures. Its larger vision is to nurture a group of young innovators in Africa working on building solutions that target emerging markets and under-served communities in Africa.

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Jun 20 2015 (IPS)

Challenges to advertisers and marketers arose in the past century. Critics deplored the role of cigarette marketers who exploited the aspirations of women by associating smoking with liberation. 

Such manipulations were explored by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), along with Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1967) and Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness (1974).  The use of subliminal advertising (rapid flashing of product images faster than human cognition) was challenged and the public discussion led to its disuse.

Hazel Henderson

By the 1980s, Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis described the “deliberate manufacturing of falsehood” in The Unreality Industry (1989), followed by William Schrader’s Media Blight and the Dehumanizing of America (1992), Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (2005).

Fast forward to today’s ethical challenges.

Political advertising of candidates was likened to selling toothpaste as it emerged in the 1970s and summarized by Charles Lewis in The Buying of the President (1996) and James Fallows in Breaking the News (1996). Today, the gutting of restrictions on money in U.S. elections has led to the well-financed blizzard of attack ads that lead millions of voters to turn off their TV sets in disgust. Media corporations and their TV channels have come to rely on such financial bonanzas during elections.

What this confirms is that advertising influences media owners and the content of programmes and often distorts news coverage, leading to subtle commercial censorship rarely recognised as a threat to free speech in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records. “Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records”

I summarised these issues a few years ago in an interview in Forbes magazine on why I founded the EthicMark Awards for “advertising that uplifts the human spirit and society”.

These Awards recognise that advertising, a global 500 billion dollars a year  industry, can be a powerful force for good beyond consumerism, in educating, inspiring and showcasing the best innovations for growing more inclusive, greener, knowledge-rich and sustainable societies.

The newest challenge to advertisers comes from Silicon Valley with the many apps that allow users to skip and block ads, including AdBlockPlus (downloaded 400 million times), as well as add-ons to Chrome and Firefox browsers.  Ad block users have grown to 200 million a month, according to PageFair and The Economist.

Advertisers could redeem their reputations and business models via Truth in Advertising Assurance Set Aside (TIAASA) which would disallow their tax exempt funds on false advertising and then award these funds to civic challengers to hire ad agencies to prepare counter-advertising campaigns.

All this highlights the growing vulnerability of media business models in the United States, other industrial societies and worldwide.

Many new media business models which no longer rely on advertising are debated in The Death and Life of American Journalism (2010) by Robert McChesney and John Nichols who compare media access policies in many countries which subsidise investigative journalism, such as Britain’s BBC.

In the United States, foundations support news organisations such as the National Geographic, the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica, and media outlets such as the Columbia Journalism Review. The American Prospect and The Nation are largely funded by subscribers as well as PBS and NPR in broadcasting, along with many internet-based media such as The Real News Network.

Google banned ad-blocking apps in 2013, yet alternative web-browsers such as UC Browser already claims 500 million users, mostly in China and India, and Eyeo launched its ad-blocking browser available for mobile devices running Google’s Android.  These battles will rage on until legal systems – always lagging behind technology – catch up.

Two reports from the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program led by Charles Firestone – “Navigating Continual Disruption” and “The Atomic Age of Data” – discuss the digitisation of ever more sectors of industrial societies and the internet of things (IOT).

In the United States, the monopolising of internet access by Comcast, AT&T and Verizon has restricted broadband access to millions in less affluent, rural communities and prevented small towns from competing with public broadband systems, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity and Susan Crawford in Captive Audience (2013).

The good news follows the analysis and proposals of Kunda Dixit in DatelineEarth: Journalism as if the Planet Mattered (IPS, 1997) and includes Dan Gillmore’s We the Media (2004) on grassroots journalism; David Bollier’s In Search of the Public Interest in the New Media (2002); Democratizing Global Media (2005); Making the Net Work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Society (2003) from Britain’s Forum for the Future; and Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? (2013). (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

There has been robust growth in Internet access and usage over the past few years and Africa is now primed to take advantage of the social and economic opportunities that Internet can bring to people across the continent, according to Kathy Brown, President and CEO of the Internet Society.

Speaking at the Africa Internet Summit (AIS) being held in the Tunisian capital from Jun. 2 to 5, Brown highlighted the progress made in recent years to bring improved Internet access and availability to more people in Africa, noting how this growth has provided a strong foundation for stimulating opportunity through an enabling environment defined by inclusion, innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Africa’s recent economic growth rates and growing entrepreneurial spirit are combining to create a climate of opportunity,” said Brown.

“Advances in Internet infrastructure and the meteoric rise of the mobile Internet have already transformed the African technology landscape. I believe that Africa’s Internet is now at a tipping point, poised for further positive change and expansion as the continent looks forward with confidence to the future.”

However, she noted that there are still barriers which must be overcome in order to capture the full economic and social promise of the Internet. While connectivity is on the rise and available bandwidth in Africa has increased significantly, challenges for the African Internet business ecosystem still include factors such as the cost of broadband, online fraud, lack of local content and fragmented markets.

“Africa is now the frontier for the next wave of Internet progress,” said Brown. “While there is huge potential for Africa to continue building an Internet that will best serve its needs and its people, it is critical that true collaboration across Africa’s technical community, a culture of innovation and a spirit of entrepreneurship form part of this process.

The Internet Society stands with Africa to continue the great momentum under way to overcome challenges and enable the economic and social possibilities that only a truly open, trusted Internet can deliver.”

The Internet Society is an international, non-profit organisation founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education and policy.

Edited by Phil Harris   

By Carlos M. Correa
GENEVA, Feb 3 2015 (IPS)

Industry’s demands and political pressures exerted by developed countries to expand and strengthen patent protection worldwide have been based on the argument that patents promote innovation and thereby contribute to achieve social, political and economic well-being, independently of the level of development of the country where they are granted and enforced.

This view ignores the fact that patents do not have the same impact in countries with different industrial bases, research and development (R&D) capabilities and availability of capital to finance innovation, among others.

Carlos M. Correa

Significantly, there is a growing body of academic studies challenging the belief that patents are essential to incentivise innovation, even in advanced countries, or to enhance economic growth.

While many scholars call for a substantial reform of the patent system, others go as far as suggesting its abolition.

In a working paper entitled The case against patents, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine have argued that “in spite of the enormous increase in the number of patents and in the strength of their legal protection we have neither seen a dramatic acceleration in the rate of technological progress nor a major increase in the levels of research and development (R&D) expenditure. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.”

“Both of these observations are consistent with theories of innovation that emphasise competition and first-mover advantage as the main drivers of innovation and directly contradict theories postulating that government-granted monopolies are crucial in order to provide incentives for innovation.”

The role of the patent system is thus controversial, particularly in developing countries.“Patents do not have the same impact in countries with different industrial bases, research and development (R&D) capabilities and availability of capital to finance innovation, among others”

In the last 25 years, much emphasis has been put on the concept of intellectual property as ‘truly property’. Different variants of natural rights-based approaches have been articulated to justify developed countries’ relentless efforts to increase the scope and levels of intellectual property protection, notably for patents.

The idea that patents are a piece of property has provided ideological support for an expansion of the protectable subject matter, the extension of the term of protection, the reinforcement of the exclusive rights, and the strengthening of enforcement measures.

Patents confer exclusive rights. They limit the use of knowledge – a public good by its very nature – and competition, which promotes consumer well-being and innovation.

Nobody can produce or commercialise the protected invention during the lifetime of the patent, unless authorised by the patent holder or under compulsory licences, which are rarely granted. Given the exclusionary effects of patents, they have often been characterised as ‘monopolies’.

Yet, the rights conferred by patents are based on partial and often imperfect factual determinations. The examination process does not allow patent offices to reach definitive
judgments on patentability.

There is also uncertainty regarding the validity of patents in the boundaries of what is protected under individual patents. The patent claims are in many cases ambiguous and it is unclear what the actually protected subject matter is. Australian academic Peter Drahos asserts that “patents, unlike blocks of land, do not come with settled boundaries.”

Thus, it is fuzziness rather than definitiveness that characterises patent grants. This is not accidental, but deliberately sought by patent applicants to discourage competitors.

In addition to imprecise disclosures of what is deemed to be the invention, courts interpret patent claims with different theories and methodologies that lead to diverse outcomes with regard to what is deemed protected and eventually infringed.

Another fundamental problem with the patent regime is that it operates on the basis of a limited capacity to examine the patentability of claimed inventions and on a number of legal fictions created by legislators, patent offices or courts.

Such legal fictions are often dogmatically applied, without a critical assessment of their justification and implications.

A patent is granted in most countries after a substantive examination is conducted to determine whether it meets the patentability standard established by national laws which generally require novelty, inventive step (or non-obviousness) and industrial applicability (or utility).

However, some countries (such as Luxembourg and South Africa) confer patents without such a substantive examination or without assessing inventive step (for example, Switzerland and France).

While patent offices in developing countries (except China) receive a number of patent applications much lower than developed countries, some (such as Argentina, India and Thailand) have introduced legislative or other regulatory changes to tighten the application of the patentability requirements and reduce, through a rigorous examination, the proliferation of patents, particularly in the pharmaceutical field.

The intervention of patent offices through substantive examination in the process of creating patent rights gives them an appearance of validity. However, such intervention offers no guarantee in this respect and the public and uninformed business actors may be grossly misled.

The case of South Africa, where no substantive examination is currently made, is illustrative.

Thousands of patents have been registered in South Africa to cover minor or trivial developments that can block local production or importation of lower-priced generic medicines. However, the government of South Africa recently announced its intention to introduce a system of substantive examination, at least for pharmaceutical patents.

This proposal raised stiff opposition from pharmaceutical multinational companies, which were eventually found to finance a covered lobbying operation aimed at derailing the government’s initiative.

On the one hand, it is to be expected that the introduction of such a system would discourage patent applications that may not survive a serious substantive analysis; hence, the number of applications will presumably diminish over time, especially if fees are established at a level that discourages speculative patenting.

On the other, the available information on patent offices in other developing countries suggests that the number of examiners required to review pharmaceutical patent applications is manageable for South Africa even if it opted to rely on internal examiners only.

Unfortunately, many patent offices have tended to work under the assumption that their role is to grant as many patents as possible, and to decide in favour of the applicant in case of doubt. Applicants are often treated as ‘clients’.

As noted by Dominique Foray, patent offices have become extremely pro-patent since the early 1980s. The applicant, formerly considered with suspicion, has become a ‘client’ whose needs must be satisfied by quick, cheap procedures. The result is a total deterioration of examination procedures.

The patent office should function as a steward of the public interest, not as a servant of patent applicants and must protect the public against the issuance of invalid patents that add unnecessary costs and may confer market power. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

* This column is based on South Centre Research Paper No 58 of December 2014. A full version of the paper is available here.

Excerpt:

By Lyndal Rowlands and Mercedes Sayagues
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 29 2014 (IPS)

In rural Zambia and Malawi, new mums face long delays finding out if they have passed HIV on to their babies.

Without treatment, a third of babies born with HIV will die before their first birthday and half before their second. Starting treatment within the first 12 weeks of life vastly improves their chances of survival.

But testing babies is not easy in poor countries.

Because mothers pass antibodies to their babies in the womb, the usual adult antibody tests during the first months of life can be inaccurate.

A virological test is needed. But only a handful of central labs can do these in Zambia and Malawi. On the long journey to and from the lab on the back of a motorbike or truck, the blood sample or the result often gets lost.

Some studies suggest that nearly half of tests never reach the clinics or the mothers.

Meanwhile, the new mum returns to her village and she and the baby likely drop out from the clinic’s radar.

Malawi and Zambia each has an estimated one million people living with HIV. In 2012, new HIV infections among children numbered 9,400 in Zambia and 11,000 in Malawi. Just over one third of babies were tested.

The old system couldn’t cope. New ideas and technologies were needed.

Enter UNICEF Innovation with an open source, code-based RapidSMS software: as soon as the lab result is in, the rural clinic’s nurse receives it by SMS on a cell phone or looks it up on the website. In remote villages, a community health worker receives the SMS and alerts the parents.

All information is encoded to ensure privacy and the software includes a web dashboard for reporting and administration.

In Zambia, the turnaround was cut from two or three months down to one month, said Shadrack Omol, deputy representative of UNICEF in Lusaka.

The SMS relaying is part of an antenatal system, Project Mwana (KiSwahili for child), that brings other benefits for all new mums as well.

At the first antenatal visit, the mother’s details are entered in Mwana’s SMS reminder system for alerts on checkups, immunizations, baby weighing and drug refills.

Bundling the HIV component with regular mother and baby care helps avoid stigma and fear of being identified as HIV positive.

In 2011, a Mozambican charity with 22,000 people on ARV treatment tried to build a cellphone database to remind patients of appointments: fearing loss of privacy and stigma, only half gave their cellphone numbers.

In Zambia, Mwana covers 484 clinics in 10 provinces. In Malawi, it has delivered more than 20,000 tests.

The next step, says Emanuel Saka, HIV specialist with UNICEF in Malawi, will be “expanding the geographical coverage and scope of the technology” and targeting adolescents with HIV.

New solutions to old problems

The best solution would be to test babies at the point of care in the rural clinic without any delays. In Mozambique, health workers are trying out a new viral load testing machine that can diagnose young babies in less than one hour.

“This is a great breakthrough,” said Bindiya Meggi, a pharmacist working on this project with the National Institute of Health.

Made by the German company ALERE, the machine is being tried in four sites with the help of the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

“It’s very simple to use,” said Ocean Tobaiwa, a Zimbabwean technician at the trial clinic in Maputo

As the machine is tested, it is adapted to local conditions, such as irregular electricity, black outs, power surges, heat and humidity. German technicians visit regularly to tweak the machines.

At present, babies are tested at one-month of age. A dry blood sample is collected through a heel or finger prick and sent to a central lab for viral load analysis.

Mozambique has only four such labs for a population of 24 million, with some 900,000 HIV positive women, and thousands of kilometers of roads impassable in the rainy season.

Although in theory results should be returned in two weeks, the reality is one month or more. Meanwhile, as in Zambia and Malawi, mother and baby are lost to follow-up.

In Zambia, RapidSMS is the backbone of U-Report, a booming HIV hotline service for young people, which garnered 71,000 users in two years. (see sidebar)

UNICEF Innovation Labs work with universities and the public and private sector to find new solutions to old problems in health, education, and water and sanitation.

“There is so much to do in the area of technology and real time information that hasn’t yet been explored,” Kochi said.

Putting the spotlight on culture. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
FLORENCE, Oct 4 2014 (IPS)

International experts working in the creative sector are calling for governments to recognise the integral role that culture plays in development and to ensure that culture is a part of the post-2015 United Nations development goals, to be discussed next year.

At UNESCO’s Third World Forum on Culture and Cultural Industries, which took place Oct. 2-4 in Florence, Italy, representatives from a range of countries discussed the contributions that culture can make to a “sustainable future” through stimulating employment, economic growth and innovation.

The United Nations cultural agency pointed out that the global trade in cultural goods and services has doubled over the past decade and is now valued at more than 620 billion dollars, although there is some disagreement on this figure.

But, apart from the financial aspects, culture also contributes to social inclusion and justice, according to UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova, who inaugurated the forum at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.“Countries must invest in culture with the same determination they bring to investing in energy resources, in new technologies … In a difficult economic environment, we must look for activities that reinforce social cohesion, and culture offers solutions in this regard” – UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova

“I believe countries must invest in culture with the same determination they bring to investing in energy resources, in new technologies,” she said. “In a difficult economic environment, we must look for activities that reinforce social cohesion, and culture offers solutions in this regard.”

Bokova told IPS that the forum wanted to show that culture contributes to the “attainment” of the various development goals, which include ending extreme poverty, achieving universal primary education and gender equality, and ensuring environmental sustainability.

Many governments, however, are not investing enough in the cultural or creative sectors even when these industries have proven their worth. Some states prefer to build sports stadiums that are rarely used rather than to support the arts, said Lloyd Stanbury, a Jamaican lawyer in the music business who participated in the forum.

“In the case of Jamaica, we’ve shown that we can compete and win globally at the highest levels in culture,” he told IPS. “Reggae and Rastafari have put Jamaica on the world map and the debate is happening right now about what the government can do to invest more in culture.”

Stanbury said that arts education should have the same status as traditional curricula. “Students are sometimes told, ‘oh, you can’t do maths? Go and draw something’ but their drawings aren’t considered valuable,” he said.

In some developing countries, the arts are seen as a peripheral sector, not a “real” industry and that must change, he argued.

In addition, Stanbury said in his presentation to the forum, in many developing countries, “segments of the music and entertainment community do not enjoy harmonious relationships with government and government institutions, particularly where there is evidence of government corruption that artists speak out against in the creation and presentations of their work.”

For many governments, meanwhile, investing in culture naturally comes a long way behind providing proper health, sanitation and electricity services and developing transportation infrastructure. Yet, culture can help in poverty alleviation, job creation and peace building, experts said.

Peter N. Ives, Mayor pro tem of the U.S. city of Santa Fe, New Mexico, detailed how the city had invested in the arts, through allocating one percent of hotel-bed taxes (or lodger taxes) for cultural activities, among other measures.

“Santa Fe now has more cultural assets per capita than any other city in the United States,” he said, adding that “inclusion” of all groups was a key element of the policy, in which “everyone brings their creative gifts to the table”.

The city has an Arts Commission, appointed by the mayor, that “recommends programmes and policies to develop and promote artistic excellence in the community” and it has followed a multi-cultural route.

The result is that Santa Fe has increasingly drawn writers and visual artists, as well as tourists, because of its growing number of museums, performances and outdoor sculptures – also one of the reasons behind its designation as a UNESCO Creative City.

Such “success stories” may seem far-fetched for many poor or middle-income countries, faced with a variety of crises including conflict. But experts at the conference described grassroots schemes where intra-community violence, for instance, decreased when community members were actively encouraged to produce art about their lives.

Other representatives examined how creating film and literary festivals had contributed to a sense of national pride and cohesion. In the Caribbean and in parts of Africa and Asia, for example, the growth of festivals and cultural prizes has given a general boost to the arts in some countries, reflecting what wealthy countries have known for some time.

The forum, jointly organized by UNESCO, the Italian government, the Tuscany region and the Municipality of Florence, also examined how culture can be preserved in war-affected regions, with a focus on recent UNESCO cultural heritage preservation projects (funded by Italy) in Afghanistan, Mali and other states.

Denmark and Belgium, meanwhile, provided a look at how overseas development aid to cultural activities can promote employment, training and youth involvement in society, especially within a human rights context.

“We’re living in a very hostile environment for development cooperation and also for culture and development, but I’m launching an appeal for more cooperation in this area,” said Frédéric Jacquemin, director of Africalia, a Belgian organisation that sees culture as “a motor for sustainable human development”.

Participants in the forum produced a ‘Florence Declaration’ calling for the “full integration of culture into sustainable development policies and strategies at the international, regional and local levels.”

The Declaration said that this should be based on standards that “recognise fundamental principles of human rights, freedom of expression, cultural diversity, gender equality, environmental sustainability, and openness and balance to other cultures and expressions of the world.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Carlos M. Correa
GENEVA, Sep 29 2014 (IPS)

The steady increase in patent applications and grants that is taking place in developed and some developing countries (notably in China) is sometimes hailed as evidence of the strength of global innovation and of the role of the patent system in encouraging it. 

Carlos M. Correa

However, such an increase does not correspond to a genuine rise in innovation. It points instead to a major deviation of the patent system away from its intended objective: to reward those who contribute to technological progress by creating new and inventive products and processes.

The increase in the number of patents reflects, to a large extent, the low requirements of patentability applied by patent offices and courts. Patents granted despite the absence of a genuine invention detract knowledge from the public domain and can unduly restrain legitimate competition.

Low standards of patentability encourage a large number of applications that would not otherwise be made, leading to a world backlog estimated at over 10 million unexaminedpatents.

This problem affects various sectors. For instance, Nokia is reported to hold around 30,000 patents relating to mobile phones, a large part of which are likely to be invalid, while Samsung holds more than 31,000 patent families. A study covering various fields of clean energy technologies, including solar photovoltaic, geothermal, wind and carbon capture, found nearly 400,000 patent documents.“The steady increase in patent applications and grants … does not correspond to a genuine rise in innovation. It points instead to a major deviation of the patent system away from its intended objective: to reward those who contribute to technological progress by creating new and inventive products and processes”

The proliferation of patents is particularly high and problematic in the pharmaceutical sector, where large companies actively seek to acquire broad portfolios of patents in order to extend patent protection beyond the expiry of the original patents on new compounds. These ever-greening strategies allow them to keep generic producers out of the market and charge prices higher than those that would otherwise exist in a competitive scenario.

For example, the basic patent for paroxetine, an antidepressant, expired in the late 1990s, whereas ‘secondary’ patents will extend up to 2018.

Ever-greening strategies by one company often force others to follow the same pattern as a defensive approach.  The proliferation of ‘secondary’ or ‘spurious’ patents can impose significant costs on patients and public health systems.

Several measures can be applied at the national level to avoid the proliferation of patents on trivial developments in full consistency with the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), because they fall within the policy space that World Trade Organisation (WTO) members have retained to design and apply their patent laws.

The most important policy that governments may implement is the rigorous application of the requirements of patentability, based on a thorough examination of patent applications. The TRIPS agreement neither defines the concept of ‘invention’ nor how such requirements need to be interpreted.

Thus, national laws may differentiate inventions and discoveries, and require that the former result from an inventive activity, thereby excluding pre-existing subject matter that is merely found, such as natural substances.

While some patent offices grant patents on the basis of legal fictions on novelty, there is no reason to follow such practices in other jurisdictions.

An example of this practice by some patent offices is to admit what are known as ‘selection patents’, whereby one of more items that were previously disclosed are independently claimed. This type of patents provide an effective means of ever-greening, because protection can be extended for the full length of a new patent, i.e. normally twenty additional years, despite the fact that novelty was actually lost when such items were first disclosed.

While some large patent offices, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office and the Chinese Patent Office, seem to apply a lax inventive step standard thereby allowing for the granting of a large number of ‘low quality’ patents, there are strong public interest arguments to follow a different approach, particularly in developing countries.

A strict application of the industrial applicability/usefulness requirement, when provided for by the national law, may also contribute to prevent the grant of unwarranted patent rights.

This is the case, in particular, for claims on new medical uses, which are equivalent to claims over methods of treatment that have no industrial application or technical effect. The lack of industrial applicability may be a sufficient ground to reject such claims.

Given the policy space left by the TRIPS agreement to adopt their own definitions of the patentability standards, and to do so consistently with their legal systems and practices, governments can follow different methods to ensure that patents are granted only when there are sufficient merits under the applicable law.

Governments may introduce specific standards in the patent laws themselves. A notable case is the Indian Patent Act, as amended in 2005, which incorporated in section 3(d) specific standards to assess patent applications in the field of chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

In a case brought by Novartis (a Swiss pharmaceutical company) against the rejection of its patent application relating to a beta crystalline form of imatinib mesylate, the Indian Supreme Court held that the claimed invention failed in both the tests of invention and patentability.

The definition of the standards of patentability can also be made through regulations, including patent offices’ guidelines. A good example is provided by the guidelines on the patentability of pharmaceutical products and processes adopted by the Argentine government in 2012 to limit the ever-greening of pharmaceutical patents.

Finally, it is worth noting that in applying patentability standards, patent offices can differentiate, in line with the TRIPS agreement, among fields of technology in order to take into account particular features of specific sectors and public policies objectives, for instance in relation to the promotion of generic drugs.

Measures to accommodate these differences constitute a necessary response to the diversity of technologies and, consequently, a condition sine qua non for an intrinsically balanced system of protection that remains neutral in its effects on competition. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

This column is taken from the author’s research paper on ‘Tackling the Proliferation of Patents: How to Avoid Undue Limitations to Competition and the Public Domain’, published by the South Centre (http://www.southcentre.int/research-paper-52-august-2014/).

Excerpt:

Products made from collected garbage provide a new source of livelihood for many in the “gur districts” (urban outskirts) of Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Credit: Jonathan Rozen/IPS

By Jonathan Rozen
ULAANBAATAR, Sep 22 2014 (IPS)

Ulziikhutag Jigjid, 49, is a member of a 10-person group in the Khan-Uul district on the outskirts of Mongolia’s capital Ulaanbaatar, which is producing brooms, chairs, containers, and other handmade products from discarded soda and juice containers.

“In the early morning we collect raw materials from the street, and then we spend the morning making products,” Jigjid told IPS. At four o’clock in the evening, she heads off to her regular job at a meat company.

The creation of her group’s business, and others like it, are part of an initiative called Turning Garbage Into Gold (TG2G), developed and supported by Tehnoj, an Ulaanbaatar-based non-governmental organisation.

“Ulaanbaatar produces about 1,100 tons of solid waste every day…This poses health risks to the population of the city and causes environmental damages." -- Thomas Eriksson, UNDP’s deputy resident representative in Mongolia
Founded in 2007, this organisation supports the creation of small businesses based on the sale of handcrafted products.

Defining itself as a “business incubator centre” for small and medium-sized businesses, Tehnoj estimates that it has organised trainings for approximately 30,000 people across Mongolia, through various projects.

The TG2G project is currently operational in three of Ulaanbaatar’s outer districts: Khan-Uul, Chingeltei and Songino Khairkhan, and includes 20 production groups of around five to six people each.

“The goal of this project is to recycle products and reduce unemployment,” Galindev Galaariidii, director of Tehnoj, told IPS.

The NGO receives its funding from the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP)’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific Innovation Fund, a new U.N. initiative to support innovative programmes that “provide the creative space and discretionary resources to prototype innovative solutions and experiment with new ways of working to tackle complex development challenges outside the traditional business cycle,” Thomas Eriksson, UNDP’s deputy resident representative in Mongolia, explained to IPS.

The Innovation Fund is currently supporting the creation of programmes in 32 countries and helps promote environmental sustainability and inclusive economic and social development, key components of the U.N.’s post-2015 development agenda.

Waste management and pollution are major problems in Mongolia, especially in the urban outskirts. With extremely limited infrastructure and a general lack of governmental resources, Galaariidii explains that 90 percent of garbage from these areas ends up on the street.

“Ulaanbaatar produces about 1,100 tons of solid waste every day… This poses health risks to the population of the city and causes environmental damages,” said Eriksson.

According to UNDP, over 10,000 households move to Ulaanbaatar every year. “Unfortunately, the migrant population [find it difficult to gain employment] and obtain access to already strained social services,” Eriksson continued.

The TG2G programme aims to mitigate the waste management issues while also tackling social inequalities by empowering the less fortunate members of some of Mongolia’s poorest communities.

According to World Bank data for 2012-2013, Mongolia’s poverty rate stood at 27.4 percent of its population of 2.9 million people.

Finding jobs in the landlocked country, comprised of some 1.6 million square km, of which only 0.8 percent is arable land, is no easy task. While the mining sector has led rapid economic growth over the last decade, with growth touching 16 percent in the first quarter of 2012, not everyone has benefitted. In fact, the unemployment rate in 2012 was roughly 11 percent.

“We target Ulaanbaatar’s poorest areas with high unemployment,” Galaariidii explained to IPS. “We focus on two main groups: women [often mothers of disabled children], and the unemployed.”

The programme currently focuses on training groups in the creation of six main products: brooms, chairs, foot covers (often used for walking in temples or schools), picnic mats, waterproof ger (yurt) insulation sheets and containers of all sizes.

But new product designs are constantly being created. Oven mitts, bags, hats and aprons are just a few of the new forms of merchandise being developed.

“Our technology design is improving day by day,” said Galaariidii. For example, where zippers once secured the fabric covers of chairs, now elastic rings are used.

Presently, city cleaning teams are testing products with the potential for a government contract, and soda-bottle-broom orders are already coming in from hairdressers in Ulaanbaatar.

Communities involved in the TG2G programme seem to have a fresh sense optimism about the future.

Unrolling a large hand-drawn poster, Jigjid and two other group members – Baguraa Adiyabazar, 54, and Baasanjav Jamsranjav, 37 – explained how they plan to use the funds they earn from selling their products.

They want to build a kindergarten school, achieve full employment in their area, build a chicken farm, expand their ability to grow their own food and increase the availability of cars. There are even plans to allot a certain amount of the money towards a savings account, which can then be used to make small loans within the community.

“We plan to have more registration for the projects and more training programmes,” Jigjid explained. “[Eventually] we want to replace products that are imported from other countries.”

Beyond the material level, the programme is also having a positive impact on the mentality of the community.

“We have a mission to become more creative,” Jigjid continued. “Now as a group we have a goal.”

Next year Jigjid will retire from her job with the meat company and focus on building their product development into a successful business.

“I will have something to do,” she said happily. “I can see my future is secure.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Moselyn Muchena, one of the girls being given a chance under the TechWomen initiative. Credit: Mary Kashumba/IPS

By Mary Kashumba
HARARE, Jul 10 2014 (IPS)

For 22-year-old Moselyn Muchena, a final year computer science student at the University of Zimbabwe, it seemed obvious to create a mobile application offering easy access to services in the local catering industry, largely because of the huge number of female entrepreneurs in that sector.

“The kinds of problems these women are going through inspired me to come up with an innovative application for the industry called ORDER NOW, through which they can [post] their menus and specials, as well as their location and the prices of items.

“The application is also interactive, allowing customers to share [their reviews] on other social networks platforms … and it offers a platform for feedback, which is vital for businesses,” Muchena told IPS. The app also allows for advertising.“We want to tap into the creative and innovative base of 52 percent of the population. Imagine what the world has lost in innovation due to the lack of or fewer women in these creative spaces” – TechWomen Zimbabwe

“I am grateful to get this opportunity to create a culinary application that can be used by restaurants, where mostly women dominate the field,” she said, adding that she hoped her app will have a global reach.

According to Farai Mutambanengwe, president of the Small to Medium Scale Enterprises Association of Zimbabwe, women dominate the catering industry in Zimbabwe. He told IPS that while the association had no actual analysis “on the number of women who are in the culinary industry compared with men, generally women continue to grow in dominating this field.”

Muchena sees herself as paving the way for other girls to enter the fields of science and technology. “Being the only girl doing computer science in my class, I used to feel like an outcast and it took me time to blend in to become part of the class and not ‘the woman’ in the class. I said to myself I would also pave the way for young girls who aspire to have a career in technological innovations.”

The young innovator is just one of over 100 girls and women aged between 10 and 23 who are creating innovative technologies to address community problems in Zimbabwe. They are part of a U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs initiative called TechWomen, a programme designed to empower, connect and support the next generation of women leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Referring to her own experience in developing her software, Muchena pointed out that there was an urgent need for investors in the field of science. “Our plight as young science entrepreneurs is that there are no investors willing to engage youths who are coming up with innovations.” However, lack of investment in the science sector has dwindled as a result of a restrictive economy.

According to a 2008 report in the Economic Reform Feature Service  of the Centre for International Enterprise (CIPE), “the education system in Zimbabwe has long suffered from an insufficient focus on teaching practical skills, limited access to higher education opportunities, and unequal access for girls to specialised fields such as science.”

“Successful educational reform is a necessary step to create the basis for sustained economic growth and requires the involvement of all stakeholders, ranging from families and civil society into national and local governments as well as the private sector,” said the report.

National Zimbabwean statistics for 2012 show that the number of women who enrolled in faculties of engineering, computer science and science technology at university level were 17 percent, 35 percent and 22 percent respectively in 2009. A year later, women’s enrolment in these faculties were 17. 5 percent, 39 percent and 18 percent respectively.

Chemical technologist Aretha Mare, one of the members of TechWomen Zimbabwe, founded by five Zimbabwean women who graduated from the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen initiative, told IPS that its vision is to see gender parity, or 50 percent representation of women in all STEM professions.

“We want to tap into the creative and innovative base of 52 percent of the population,” says TechWomen Zimbabwe. “Imagine what the world has lost in innovation due to the lack of or fewer women in these creative spaces.”

Mare said that under the TechWomen initiative, “the women act as role models, mentors and teachers, creating a networking platform and peer-to-peer interaction with sharing of knowledge to keep them motivated and sharing of opportunities, thus avoiding the leaky pipe where a few women who pursue STEM careers also switch careers or leave due to frustrations in the workplace.”

According to Mare, “the girls’ programme aims to expose girls to STEM fields through experiential learning, where they identify problems, use STEM to solve them, recalibrate and ideate again. We try to do it in hands on, fun and engaging way.”

“We believe we are causing a revolution, transitioning Zimbabwe into a tech power house through girls and women as we target girls from marginalised backgrounds (both in school and out of school), some of them with no prior computer experience and most with limited access to technology. So far we have trained over 100 girls,” she added.

Meanwhile, under its Strategic Plan (2011-2015), Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in partnership with the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has embarked on a massive programme to revive science teaching in the country. The programme is being funded through the Education Development Fund (EDF), a multi-donor funding mechanism.

The programme has already distributed 2,449 sciences kits and is currently working on the re-training of more than 5,000 science teachers from the 2,336 secondary schools in the country on the safe use and maintenance of the equipment in the kits.

For Muchena, it all comes down to convincing parents and the government to strive to ensure that talent is given a chance. “I encourage parents and the authorities to understand that sometimes it is not about the academic aspects but about realising a child’s ability and nurturing it into something big.”

Thérèse Izayi, a Congolese engineer, invented two very unusual traffic robots. This one is situated at an intersection on Triumphal boulevard, near parliament in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital. Credit: Taylor Toeka Kakala/IPS

By Taylor Toeka Kakala
GOMA, DR Congo, Apr 30 2014 (IPS)

“There are several robots in the world, but that one which regulates traffic is made in Congo,” Thérèse Izayi, a female engineer and the Congolese inventor of two very unusual traffic signals, tells IPS.

Situated at an intersection on Triumphal Boulevard, near the Democratic Republic of Congo’s parliament in the capital, Kinshasa, the 2.5-metre traffic signal looks like an actual robot — with arms, legs, a chest and a head.

The breastplate pivots as the lights on it change from green to red. Then, it raises its arm to stop the traffic on one road, allowing vehicles from another to pass. The talking robot — it speaks both French and the local Lingala language — instructs: “Drivers, you can leave the road to pedestrians.”

It is made from aluminium to withstand high temperatures and humidity, and the heavy rains of this equatorial climate. There are cameras by its eyes and on its shoulders, which continuously film the traffic. It is also solar-powered to ensure its independence from electricity.

This robot is now a part of everyday life here and there is a second one on Lumumba Boulevard — en route to the international airport. Both are locally patented by Women Technology, an NGO that Izayi founded to give women engineers a platform.

“The robot captures images, which it sends using the antenna on his head to the [Women Technology] centre that stores the data. It is also equipped with an automatic detection system that tells it that pedestrians want to cross,” Izayi explains.

Izayi says that the recorded film could be sent to the traffic police, to allow authorities to prosecute drivers who have committed traffic offences.

Thérèse Izayi’s robot is situated at an intersection on Triumphal boulevard, near parliament in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital. Credit: Taylor Toeka Kakala/IPS

Kinshasa is a city where traffic lights are almost non-existent and the Highway Code is constantly violated. The capital city, with a population of  10 million, is known for its chaotic traffic.

“The robot just solved the problem of corrupt policemen,” a taxi driver tells IPS.

Traffic police, who earn small salaries, are often accused of extorting money from divers. They allegedly do this by stopping cars in the middle of the road to demand bribes, which results in constant traffic jams.

“Traffic jams are often linked to police harassment more than traffic density,” Val Manga, president of the National Road Safety Commission, known by its French acronym, CNPR, tells IPS. The robots on Lumumba and Triumphal ensure quick stops and no policemen.

According to CNPR, there are around 400,000 vehicles on Kinshasa’s roads. But of the total number of vehicles in the country, only five percent are new.

Each month, around 40 people are killed in accidents in Kinshasa, and 90 percent of these accidents are attributed to drivers’ faults.

Izayi dreams of being able to sell more robots and create manufacturing jobs throughout the country. She hopes that she will be able to market her robot internationally but points out that she is restricted by the country’s lax enforcement of laws, corruption and a very slow administrative system.

Izayi has tried numerous times to convince the government to support her project and still has not had much luck.

Obtaining a patent is a difficult process here. The costs vary and it takes six to 12 months to get approval.

Zacharie Kambale is a local inventor who has not been able to register a patent for his idea because he does not have the money for bribes.

“I have to pay money informally to officials to get things done,” Kambale tells IPS.

In 2012, Kambale developed Kongo Connect, a social network that is based in Goma. It has been nicknamed the “African Facebook”, and Kambale says it has more than 100,000 users.  The site is currently down as Kambale adds more functions to it.

Congolese economist Batamba Balembu tells IPS that he estimates four out of five companies in DRC have had to “give gifts” to get a business licence. He says that 55 percent of government revenue is lost to corruption.

There is also no enforcement of legislation relating to copyright protection here, says Chrysostome Kwede, a patent lawyer in Kisangani in northeastern DRC.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), legislation concerning industrial property was enacted here in 1982. Four year later, laws were put in place with regard to literary and artistic works.

However, WIPO says while there is legislation “from 1982 to date [1982 for industrial property and 1986 for literary and artistic works], legislative action in the DRC concerning both areas has stopped.”

“The legal vacuum is the basis of corruption in the Ministry of Industry,” Kwede tells IPS.

But government spokesperson Lambert Mende has told the media “the government’s view is very positive. But the administrative procedures [to purchase the robots] are very heavy.”

However, Izayi says interest has been expressed by the governments of Angola and neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville.

“But I am not ready to provide them with prototypes like those in Kinshasa because it is expensive,” Izayi adds.

The robots are expensive — around 15,000 dollars  — and they cost about 2,000 dollars a month to maintain.

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Nov 4 2013 (Columnist Service)

It is time to move the global policy debate beyond the binary options of “austerity” versus “stimulus.” Both these macroeconomic policies have caused untold harm to millions and produced dangerous policy stalemates in Europe and the U.S., Japan and other countries.

The experiments in Europe to impose austerity have not only caused unemployment, falling growth rates and quality of life but also rising extremism and political polarisation.

Europeans have learned that debts can’t be paid by more borrowing. And the U.S. Congress is succumbing to mob rule by 50 Republicans who shut down the government. These self-inflicted crises are damaging U.S. credibility and its currency.

The lessons of stimulus are equally dire. Monetary expansion loses effectiveness with each new round of money-printing, whether as bond-buying by the European Central Bank or “quantitative easing” – QEs I, II and III – by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Hazel Henderson

Pumping up stock markets on the textbook theory that this financial prosperity will trickle down to the real economies of “Main Street” becomes less and less effective. Asset bubbles reappear, along with angry retirees and savers, rising inequality, extremist political parties and legislative deadlock.

Central bankers in emerging markets complain that all this monetary stimulus destabilises their own currencies and economies. Chinese officials plan to launch their renminbi as a global currency and have inked an agreement with Britain to make London its trading centre.

Meanwhile, fiscal stimulus causes predictable conflicts about where funds will be directed, who will win and who will lose. Popular tax cuts rarely target those whose needs assure spending their funds into the economy and often end up in more saving by rich recipients. Spending on public services and infrastructure is a larger multiplier, but is too often spent on roads or bridges to nowhere.

The question arises: are austerity or stimulus the only two options, as macroeconomic theories insist? Increasingly, leaders who claim “there is no alternative” are in disrepute.

Even the grandees of the economics profession, including those of the George Soros-backed think tank INET, are now looking for alternatives, some even pronouncing macroeconomics as defunct.

A new view from Mariana Mazzucato in her The Entrepreneurial State (2013) cuts through this narrow debate within the conventional box of economics, forcing us to look at the bigger picture through wider lenses of science policy and the evolution of technologies in the real world.

As a former science-policy wonk at the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, the National Academy of Engineering, I enjoyed Mazzucato’s slaying of so many defunct sacred cows of macroeconomics. She begins by debunking the narrow public vs. private sector framework, exposing the myth that private business and entrepreneurs are smarter and more successful than governments in the key process of innovation.

The embarrassing truth is that economics has studied the innovation process since Robert Solow’s attempt in 1957. No coherent theory has yet emerged. Engineering and technology often precede science and theory, challenging many sacred cows of tax policy and that it and research and development (R&D) funds and investments are drivers of innovation, which is a systemic product of many social, historical, geographical and cultural factors.

Another myth is that venture capital (VC) is risk-taking. Evidence shows governments in many countries are the primary risk-takers with VCs surfing the waves created by tax-payers, often providing two to eight times more venture funding than VCs.

Even Apple obtained early help with a 500,000-dollar loan from the U.S. government’s Small Business Investment Company. And every one of the 12 key technologies in its iPhone was funded by government research grants, as was the internet itself.

Not to pick on Apple, Mazzucato shows that the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm (FFT), the basis of Google’s success, was also funded by government research. In fact, the entire myth of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurship and brilliance was based on military funding and Cold War R&D which continues to this day.

I called out special pleaders like the American Energy Innovation Council of which Bill Gates of MicroSoft is a member in my “Advice for Bill Gates”. They began calling in 2010 for tripling government funds for clean energy – about which Silicon Valley is demonstrably ignorant.

All this upends the economics of stimulus versus austerity and its deeper basis on the myth that governments are bureaucratic and stupid at “picking winners” while the private sector is smart and creates the innovation engine that produces our jobs and economic growth.

Over 20 million jobs in the U.S. are created by governments at all levels. Starving government does not help economies recover, as shown in Europe, or lead in the U.S. to the “magic of marketplace” recoveries.

All these economic bromides are nonsense, and it is time to go beyond economics and look at the real processes of technological and social innovation through new spectacles.

In my The Politics of the Solar Age, I reviewed the evolution of human societies from the age of agriculture, the use of energy from wood and waterwheels to whale oil, fossil fuels to the next stage of innovation: the green economies of today’s emerging Solar Age.

Green technologies are the next great wave of human innovation. To fully exploit all these vast new opportunities, we must drop old economic categories and see the world anew. This can end the current gridlocks endlessly fighting over how to allocate resources to incumbent 20th century industries like fossil fuels and between competing legacy interests groups.

More austerity or stimulus simply deflates or inflates the decaying old pie! Human development requires investing in the technologies of the future, not bailing out old industries and past mistakes.

China, Germany, South Korea and Denmark have used government risk-taking policies to invest in the rapid growth of their green sectors and companies providing insights into their paradigms beyond economics. U.S. market fundamentalism leads to political gridlock, shutting down government services, mindless “sequestration” and loss of international prestige and competitiveness.

A clearer vision of our next human stage of development and policies articulating goals to achieve them is now vital – particularly in the U.S.

All this attests to the bankruptcy of economics, its cognitive biases toward individualism, zero sum games and against collective win-win action – even on our small, polluted plane.

The phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer in The Economist in1864, spawning the ugly philosophy of Social Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s actual thesis saw the human species’ survival through bonding and cooperating rather than competing.

We can now take in all the new scientific information available from NASA’s 12 geosynchronous satellites for better knowledge of our planet, deeper due diligence and more accurate metrics and risk management, as I describe in my “Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age”.

Excerpt:

Abel Manto with a rainwater tank and the beans he is growing despite two years of continuous drought. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIACHÃO DO JACUIPE, Brazil, Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

The first surprise on arriving at Abel Manto’s farm is how green it is, in contrast with the dry brown surroundings. His beans and fruit trees seem oblivious to the persistent drought in the semi-arid hinterland of northeast Brazil, the worst in 50 years.

An “underground reservoir” made out of plastic sheets spread below ground to contain water keeps the soil moist, allowing beans to be grown on some 1,000 square metres in spite of the drought.

Various techniques for collecting and storing rainwater, including ponds, tanks, connected reservoirs and concrete surfaces, collect nearly 1.9 million litres of water in normal rainfall years on his 10-hectare property, according to Manto.

He and his wife and small daughter use 277,000 litres for drinking and cooking. The rest is used to raise small livestock and irrigate the orchards and crops. But this year the drought has reduced his water reserves and he has had to set priorities. Manto chose to save crops that require less water, such as passion fruit and watermelon.

Another surprise is the breadth of knowledge Manto displays; he calls himself a “family farmer in transition toward agroecology.” At the age of 40 he has become well-known for his inventive solutions for coping with the periodic droughts of Brazil’s semi-arid northeast.

His greatest success is the hydraulic pump he calls “Malhação” (Workout) because it is manual and requires physical effort. About 80 centimetres high, it is made of inexpensive parts, such as plastic tubes and bottles, marbles and even disposable ballpoint pens.

Each pump costs just 116 reals (53 dollars), including pipes for drip irrigation, or 70 percent more if the client prefers a metal handle to make it easier to operate. In this case it loses up to 40 percent of the flow, which in the ordinary model, the T-shaped handle pumps 1,233 litres per hour.

The pump is capable of lifting water from a depth of four metres and irrigating at distances of hundreds of metres, depending on the slope. “One buyer told me he could irrigate 600 metres away,” Manto said.

The farmer-inventor said he had sold more than 2,000 pumps in the northeast of Brazil and some in South Africa, with interest also being expressed in Europe. He employs 15 people to manufacture them.

Now he is trying to adapt a biodigester that he saw in India, using local materials. He is already producing biogas for his kitchen stove, but he is not self-sufficient yet.

Since he was a young man, Manto has tried to make rural labour more productive and less tiring. “They called me ‘crazy’ or ‘lazy’ and said I was inventing things so I would not have to work,” he said.

Today his innovations have won recognition and his farm is a laboratory and showcase for technologies to develop family farming in the semi-arid region. The many visitors help spread the word about his successful experiments.

“Our life has improved 100 percent,” said his wife, Jacira de Oliveira, showing the stronger blue flame on her stove when it burns biogas.

“A few years ago it was hard for me to buy a bicycle, even on credit. Now we have a car and two motorbikes,” Manto said.

His productive activity is based on precise figures. The drought, which has lasted 27 months so far, caused the loss of 60 percent of his 147 fruit trees of different varieties, such as custard apples, oranges and guavas. “The most mature specimens with the deepest roots survived,” he said.

To feed his 38 goats and sheep he turns everything he can find into fodder, even plants considered weeds. And he knows their nutritional qualities.

The leaves of the local “catingueira” tree contain 14 percent protein, the same as Gliricidia sepium, a recognised forage tree. “Mata-pastaria,” a brush growth despised by local people, has even more protein at 20 to 22 percent.

“Many species are regarded as harmful,” and their nutritional potential is lost due to traditional beliefs, he said, pointing out the 11 species he has turned into forage in the shed that serves as his silo.

The old ways hinder innovation, with the argument that “this is how my father always did it,” he complained. Even within his own family there is resistance from his seven siblings who live on neighbouring farms.

His hope, he says, lies in the children. He is currently teaching environmental education to 27 children from his rural community. He would like to have his own school to expand the initiative with an ecology project he has named “The Life of the Soil.”

This dream is closer now that he is and official with the municipal secretariat for social and economic development and the environment in Riachão do Jacuipe, headed by 23-year-old Esaú da Silva who saw in Manto someone with the necessary knowledge to develop local agriculture with an environmental perspective.

The main problem is not lack of water, but “the lack of technical assistance” for the farmers of the municipality, 40 percent of whose 33,000 people live in rural areas, Silva said.

The Jacuipe, the local river, is very polluted, but it flows all year round, which is an advantage in the northeast of Brazil where most rivers dry up completely during the dry season. And “we have lots of dams,” Silva added. Spreading Manto’s experience would lead to making better use of this water, he concluded.

But collecting rainwater is key for small farmers throughout the semi-arid region. In Riachão do Jacuipe, in the state of Bahía, rainfall is low with an average of 590 to 660 mm a year, and in 2012 it was only 176 mm, Manto said.

Manto uses the social technologies that have been promoted for the past 14 years by Articulação Semiárido Brasileiro (ASA), a network of more than 800 organisations. The network is halfway to the goal of distributing one million 16,000-litre cisterns.

The Brazilian government of leftwing President Dilma Rousseff decided to speed up and overtake this target by distributing 750,000 cisterns in 2013 and 2014. But it opted for industrial mass production of plastic tanks, which subverted ASA’s programme.

The new government plan sidelined the traditional concrete slabs that cost half the price of plastic cisterns, and excluded the community from participating in building the tanks on a do-it-yourself basis, which trains people in their use and strengthens the local economy and sense of citizenship.

The experience of ASA and Manto also stands in contrast to the project to reroute the São Franciso river, by means of which the government aims to improve water supply for 12 million people in the northeast.

This mega-project is delayed by at least four years, and its cost has reached the equivalent of four billion dollars, nearly twice the original budget.

In any case, it will not serve the pòorest rural families dispersed throughout the semi-arid region who are the most vulnerable to drought. This is where the cisterns and the government’s social programmes have now been decisive in averting the popular rebellions that took place during previous droughts.

Néstor Osorio: “Young people are and always have been involved in the origins of the biggest innovations.” Credit: UN Photo

By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Apr 15 2013 (IPS)

Innovation, as the fruit of science and technology, will play a fundamental role in the Sustainable Development Goals that could go into effect in 2015, says Néstor Osorio, president of the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

In its next session, in September, the U.N. General Assembly will receive the first draft of the SDGs currently being drawn up with the input of governments, scientists and social organisations.

The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) is also taking part in the drafting process, and will discuss the question in its Annual Ministerial Review in Geneva, next July.

If they are approved, the SDGs will build upon the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were adopted by the international community in 2000 in New York with a 2015 deadline.

Using 1990 as a baseline, the governments committed themselves to halve the proportion of people who experience hunger and live in extreme poverty, reduce infant and maternal mortality by two-thirds, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, combat HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other major diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and achieve a global partnership for development.

Osorio, Colombia’s permanent representative to the U.N., explained some aspects of the SDGs in an interview given to IPS during a recent visit to Geneva.

Q: Do you think innovation should be one of the goals for this millennium?

A: I believe it is a cross-cutting issue within many of the objectives for the post-2015 period. We’re talking about the SDGs – that is, how to do something beyond the MDGs and bring together industrialised and developing countries in an ongoing process of irreversible compliance with fundamental goals for integral sustainability.

Q: In other words…

A: We’re talking about water conservation, more liveable cities, food security, infrastructure and curtailing (greenhouse) gas emissions. We have to decarbonise the planet. And all of this forms part of innovation.

Q: Who would be the actors involved in this task?

A: Those who can participate in a very efficient manner, as we have seen, are young people.

Young people are and always have been involved in the origins of the biggest innovations. Microsoft, Facebook and others have been created, innovated, by 20 or 25-year-old kids.

So there’s a very important link here: how innovation and connection and preparation of future work go together. And when it comes to gender equality, we’re talking about the same thing. In other words, it’s a cross-cutting issue.

Q: How could developing countries foment innovation?

A: I think they could do it with a fundamental commitment by governments, which translates into budget allocations.

The partnership between government and private sector is also essential throughout this process. I’ll cite an example of what we have done in Colombia: the policy of President Juan Manuel Santos has been to earmark – and a law was approved to this end – a portion of oil and mining industry royalties to the Institute of Sciences and Technology.

Q: And with respect to the private sector?

A: Companies gradually discover what their needs are and how they have to adapt to the requirements of sustainability.

(For example), there can’t be investment in projects that use huge quantities of water, because that is wasteful. Companies have to adapt to the requirements that the world presents.

Q: And with regard to the state?

A: The public sector must be aware of the importance and significance of science, technology, culture – and what they bring in terms of innovation – for the development of society. For the improvement of infrastructure, cities, transportation, and for providing better living conditions for men and women.

That’s why it is very important for it to translate into legal instruments, budget allocations and government plans.

Q: What can be expected of the ECOSOC sessions in July?

A: The debate in the High Level Segment, as it’s called, will be the culmination of the ministerial meeting.

Science, technology and culture is the theme this year for ECOSOC. But the question of financing will also be discussed.

The economic situation in the industrialised world is very serious because it has consequences, what I call collateral damages, because as incomes and economic conditions have declined in those countries, there is less money for financing development and a lower propensity for technology transfer.

I hope that very concrete policy recommendations will come out of July’s sessions.

Q: What is the climate ahead of the meeting?

A: Two weeks ago I was in Tanzania with all of the African ministers, and I was surprised to see that there is real awareness and interest in giving science and technology a predominant place in government priorities.

Q: Do you have an overview of innovation in developing countries?

A: In agriculture, immense progress has been made to increase productivity and fight pests and diseases. This is already common in coffee, cacao and cereals.

Research in India for boosting the productivity of grains and guaranteeing food security has been extraordinary. In Brazil, the new coffee-growing techniques, on 100-hectare plantations with permanent irrigation and fertilisation, have multiplied productivity 30- or 40-fold.

Q: And what about innovations with environmental effects?

A: Yes, those too, especially in different areas of agriculture, with improvements of rural conditions. For example, one concrete innovation is harnessing small waterfalls to produce energy.

I’ve seen how small turbines have been created to use a waterfall just one metre high to provide lighting in the home of a small farmer.

It’s not rocket science – or CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) science – but simple things. It’s about creating grinding machines that don’t waste water. For example, in Colombia, a coffee pulping machine was developed that takes the beans and processes them with a minimum amount of water, which is later recycled and does not end up causing pollution.

Excerpt:

Afnan Hamad (far right) and her colleagues demonstrate their invention to convert plastic waste into fuel. Credit: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours/IPS

By Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank, Dec 16 2012 (IPS)

Afnan Hamad stands proudly in front of a booth at the Ramallah Cultural Palace exhibition hall, three plastic bottles filled with discoloured liquid on the table in front of her.

“We designed a device to convert plastic waste into gasoline, kerosene and diesel fuel,” explains the 23-year-old chemical engineering graduate from An-Najah National University in Nablus, pointing to one of the bottles. “We hope to see a real factory built, and be the first supplier of alternative fuel in Palestine.”

Hamad and her colleagues – Marah Jamous, Mohammad Manasrah and Rahal Rashed – displayed their machine to convert waste into reusable fuel as part of the ‘Made in Palestine 2012’ fair held last week in Ramallah, an annual event that aims to promote skills and innovations that often get buried beneath the hardships of daily life in Occupied Palestine.

While it started off as a miniature experiment, Hamad’s machine can now hold ten kilogrammes of plastic waste and produce nine litres of fuel, she explained, adding that the invention was designed to address economic and environmental problems prevalent in the area.

“Using our device, we can get rid of a huge amount of waste, which is difficult to do in Palestine,” she told IPS. “Also since we don’t have petrol here, we can produce fuel at a lower cost. One litre of fuel will cost five shekels (about 1.30 dollars).”

Now in its seventh year, the ‘Made in Palestine’ event was co-sponsored by the local Palestinian organisation Al Nayzak and the Swedish NGO Diakonia. Two exhibitions were held, one in Ramallah and one in the Gaza Strip, showcasing over 20 innovations in the fields of engineering, IT, biology and other sciences.

“It doesn’t only tackle science, innovation and technology; (the event) also addresses the idea of business entrepreneurship. We aim to create scientific entrepreneurs who are able to make and found businesses on those innovations that they’ve thought about and put into action,” explained Maha Thaher, international relations officer at Al Nayzak.

With offices in Gaza, Jerusalem and Ramallah, Al Nayzak aims to build a more vibrant scientific culture in Palestine, and encourage critical thinking and science education among Palestinian youth.

“We don’t want students to just avoid these subjects (until) they disappear from our community,” Thaher told IPS, adding that Palestinian students are endowed with a range of talents, which deserve to be nurtured, rather than ignored, by the education system.

“This is the one thing that occupation fails to seize and severely damage: we can (always) count on our minds, our intellect and our people,” she added.

Other innovations on display in Ramallah included a multi-tasking robot equipped with special wheels that allow it to move from left to right without turning, a cell phone application that helps users reserve library books in advance, and an onion planting machine.

Planting onion bulbs can be a tricky exercise, but this machine “plants the bulbs in exactly the right way”, explained inventor and local farmer Ibrahim Da’abes, who owns 100 dunams (nine square kilometres) of farmland in the Jordan Valley area of the West Bank and believes his machine will cut farming costs in half.

“The cost is much lower than employing workers to do it by hand. Bigger farmers would need this machine,” he told IPS.

At another booth, 20-year-old computer engineering student Rasha Saffarini, and her colleagues Isra’ Al-Qatow and Abdullah Al-Qatow, showcased their cell phone application that helps people reach a healthy weight.

Called ‘Healthy Gate’, the application asks users for various inputs – including current and ideal weight, age and food preferences – and sets alarms to alert them when, and what, they should eat throughout the day.

“Because of the difficulty of going to the gym, we make it easy for people to be their ideal weight,” said Saffarini, who is in her last year at the Palestine Technical University in Tulkarm, a city in the western West Bank.

Many of the participants of the ‘Made in Palestine’ fair were women. This, according to Thaher, highlights a growing acceptance within the Palestinian community of science education as a legitimate pursuit.

Families have generally been sceptical of the idea of their daughters pursuing dreams of making an important scientific invention or discovery, since this strays so far from the traditional path women are expected to walk.

“At times we had to go door-to-door and talk to parents about how they should let their daughters be involved in such programmes and build on their ideas,” Thaher said.

“But once the parents see their children so involved in this system that cares for their scientific approaches, they start to think differently themselves.”

According to Hamad, “Our families are very proud and so are we. We invented something new for Palestine.”

(END)