The IDEA innovation days successfully launched in Burkina Faso

After Mozambique, it is now Burkina Faso’s turn to benefit from the Innovations days developed by IDEA (https://D4Dhub.eu/IDEA-project). The IDEA Project strengthens civil society organizations and academia in Africa to participate in inclusive digital transformation through the innovation days as well as capacity building and synergy creation. The IDEA Project aims at empowering digital ecosystem collaboration between Europe and Africa.

The innovations days are designed to bring together players civil society organizations and academia to collectively build the solutions to the challenges of the digital transformation.

Over 75 participants from the Burkina Faso digital ecosystem gathered in Ouagadougou to discuss the challenges, share best-practices, co-create solutions to advance the digital transformation in the country.

Representing the Minister of Digital Transition, Dr. Yaya TRAORÉ, Permanent Secretary for Innovation and Monitoring of Emerging Digital Technologies said: "I welcome this initiative which further confirms the government's tireless efforts and reinforces its actions in the field of digitalization and digital entrepreneurship"

Mr. Guillermo Fernández-Mardomingo, Programme and Policy Officer at the European Union (EU) Delegation in Burkina Faso said during the opening ceremony of the #innovationdays: "Our objective is to see how digital tools, digital transformation can really serve actions and convert challenges into targets and areas of change."

Speaking on the launch of the innovation days, the representative of the IDEA consortium Mrs. Capucine Gonnord stressed “The E and A at the end of the IDEA project name refers to Europe-Africa. We should not see Europe on one side and Africa on the other. Today, we are talking about Europe-Africa. We need to learn from each other and develop continuous dialogue between countries and between continents, and this is what is at stake in this project”

The IDEA project objectives are focusing on supporting and strengthening the role of ICT/digitalisation stakeholders (civil society and academia), to engage and contribute actively to multistakeholder dialogues for human centered digital transformation. Another objective is to support the development of joint digital innovations as a response to societal challenges hindering an inclusive digital society.

Morocco and Uganda are the next countries to host the innovations days.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of IDEA D4D Hub.

For more information, contact:
IDEA Project
idea@d4dhub.eu
https://D4DHub.eu/idea-project

About the IDEA project:
The IDEA D4D Hub project embraces an interdisciplinary and inclusive approach to empower digital ecosystem collaboration, nationally, regionally and trans-continentally (Africa-Europe), to jointly advance a human-centric digital transformation. As civil society organisations and academia are critical stakeholders in the digital transformation as well as in decision-making processes, the project is concentrating on strengthening their capacity to participate in the development of an inclusive and sustainable digital economy and society, which safeguards democratic values and rights in the interaction between citizens and technology.

The IDEA D4D Hub Project is funded by the H2020 Framework Program of the European Union, co-funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by five partners: Betterplace Lab, Enabel, Expertise France, GIZ and Smart Africa.