桃   花   源   

 Peach Blossom Shangri-La 

 大家盡一點力來創造一個人間樂園 ∞ Let's all help to create a Shangri-La 

 

First two paragraph of Chapter 1 of a book titled "Innovation & Intellectual Property: Collaborative Dynamics in Africa":

"Human development, including not just economic growth but also the capability for longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives, depends on innovation and creativity. While various economic, technological, social and other factors influence innovative and creative activity, intellectual property (IP) rights – copyrights, pa tents, trademarks, trade secrets and other appropriation mechanisms – play an increasingly important role. How IP rights help or hinder innovation and creativity in diff erent contexts in Africa is the subject of this book.

The chapters that follow canvass aspects of the current reality of IP in nine different countries from the four main regions of the African continent. The chapters contain contextual analyses as well as on-the-ground case studies based on empirical, qualitative and quantitative research – and cut across diverse socio-economic contexts and legal systems, and a spectrum of formal, informal and traditional sectors. Examined as a whole, the evidence in this book helps build understanding of the ways in which the dual goals of protecting IP and preserving access to knowledge can be balanced. The book also provides indications of the roles that are being, and can be, played by collaborative and openness-oriented dynamics in relation to innovation, creativity and IP. A better understanding of the nuances and dynamics of IP is essential to creating policy frameworks and management practices that balance IP protection and access in such a way that African regions, nations and communities can harness IP as a tool to facilitate collaborative networking within diverse systems of innovation and creativity."

 

Innovation & Intellectual Property: Collaborative Dynamics in Africa

 

The first two paragraph of the Forward of a book titled "Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa":

"Despite decades of research and advances in data and methodologies, measuring
poverty and reconciling this with patterns of economic growth is a disputatious issue. This contentiousness and the fact that poverty remains widespread in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) charged UNU-WIDER to launch in 2011 a major research project—the Growth and Poverty Project (GAPP)—to re-examine SSA’s growth, poverty, and inequality trends with three main goals in mind. First, develop new tools to measure monetary poverty in consistent and comparable ways, and make these tools accessible to scholars and analysts in Africa, other developing regions, and beyond. Second, undertake detailed case studies of sixteen of the twenty-four most populous countries in SSA (covering no less than 73.8 per cent of the population in SSA) to measure poverty trends, and ‘triangulate’ these with other development indicators. Third, develop a macro–micro analytical framework to conduct detailed research in countries where poverty and economic growth trends appear to be inconsistent.

This book holds the essential country-level harvest of this large, multicountry, multi-discipline research project brought to the reader in a condensed form together with a comprehensive synthesis to explore the depths of the unfolding story of the growth–poverty nexus in SSA and to absorb the policy implications. The project team consisted of leading international experts and UNU-WIDER researchers along with some of the African continent’s best researchers and data analysts. I hereby sincerely express my appreciation and admiration of the academic and analytical skills of this team and the detailed knowledge of the case countries brought out so clearly in this volume. Our profession does indeed have something sensible to contribute — both in recognizing that growth is in many cases translated into poverty reduction in African countries and in helping to understand why this link is sometimes not as robust as desirable."

 

Growth and Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa

 

First paragraph of the Forward of a book titled "Manufacturing Transformation - Comparative Studies of Industrial Development in Africa and Emerging Asia":

"This book presents the results of a comparative, country-based research programme entitled Learning to Compete (L2C)—led collaboratively by the African Development Bank, the Brookings Institution, and UNU-WIDER—that sought to answer a seemingly simple but puzzling question: why is there so little industry in Africa? It brings together the results of eleven detailed country case studies—eight from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), one from North Africa, and two from newly industrializing East Asia—conducted by teams of national researchers in partnership with international experts on industrial development; and provides the most comprehensive description and analysis available to date of the contemporary industrialization experience in low-income Africa. It also compares the SSA industrial development story with the more successful industrial development experiences of Tunisia, Cambodia, and Vietnam."

 

Manufacturing Transformation - Comparative Studies of Industrial Development in Africa and Emerging Asia

 

First three paragraphs of the Introduction and Summary of a report titled "Science and innovation in Egypt":

"It is not often that a country is faced with the prospect of rebuilding from the ground up. Egypt’s remarkable revolution – notwithstanding the many and inevitable challenges it presents – has ushered in an era of unprecedented hope and expectation, and the overriding sense that Egyptians have a golden opportunity to overturn three decades of social, economic and political neglect.

This is particularly true in the domains of scientific research and education, where there is near-unanimous agreement that decades of under-investment, poor planning of the way research funds are spent, excessive bureaucracy, uninspiring curricula and political meddling have severely weakened a system that once regularly produced scientists who were among the best in the world. Reforms are ongoing and excellence can still be found in many fields, but freedom of enquiry, entrepreneurship and innovation are thin on the ground in both universities and industry. Restoring these crucial pillars will be crucial to development, and will do much to help meet the demand so often heard in Tahrir Square during the revolution for “bread, freedom and social justice”.

Egypt has a huge scientific legacy to draw on. Think of the astronomy and optics of Ibn Al-Haitham in the 10th-century, Ibn Al-Nafis’s groundbreaking work on the circulation of the blood in the 13th century and the generations of medical scientists who preceded him, and the thousand-year-old rationalist tradition of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, the world’s oldest (Mapping, Box 1.1). Reviving the country’s scientific golden days will be a huge challenge, but in the spirit of Tahrir Square anything seems possible. “We believe we are alive now, whereas before we were really dead,” one academic told us. “We saw corruption at every step, then suddenly we had people who were prepared to die for the country. Now everyone wants to contribute to making things better.” He recalled a taxi driver in Cairo in the days after Mubarak’s resignation remarking that “even the air I’m breathing seems cleaner”. Anyone who knows Cairo will know that this is optimism indeed."

 

Science and innovation in Egypt

 

A book titled "Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa - Policies, Paradigms, and Entanglements, 1890s–1980s", which is the result of an international conference held in Lausanne in September 2017 (Shaping Education in the (Post) Colonial World, 1890s–1980s)":

 

Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa - Policies, Paradigms, and Entanglements, 1890s–1980s