Where is the 8th EARIMA International Conference being held?

The conference is being held in Kigali, RWA.

What is the primary focus of the conference?

The conference focuses on research and innovation management, bringing together professionals, policymakers, and academics.

8th EARIMA International Conference

Name: 8th EARIMA International Conference
Start: 2026-11-17T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-11-20T00:00:00Z
Location: Kigali

Nov 17–20, 2026Kigali, RwandaIn-person

Registration open

The 8th EARIMA International Conference, hosted in Kigali, RWA, serves as a pivotal gathering for stakeholders in research and innovation management. This event brings together professionals, policymakers, and academics to discuss advancements, challenges, and best practices within the field. The conference aims to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange, contributing to the development of robust research and innovation ecosystems, particularly within the African context.

Committees & topics

Topics
Advancing Research and Innovation for African Socio-Economic Transformation · Strengthening Research and Innovation in Bio-manufacturing · Recalibrating Research and Innovation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence · Advancing Technology Transfer for Industrial Transformation · Upgrading the Role of Research and Innovation in the Humanities · Managing Research and Innovation Grants · Amplifying Research and Innovation Ethics

Why it matters

This conference is significant for several reasons. Firstly, its location in RWA underscores the growing importance of African nations in global research and innovation landscapes. By convening in Kigali, the event highlights the continent's potential and its commitment to advancing scientific inquiry and technological development. Secondly, the focus on research and innovation management is critical for translating scientific discoveries into tangible societal and economic benefits. Effective management ensures resources are optimized, ethical considerations are addressed, and research outcomes are impactful.

Furthermore, the conference provides a platform for addressing disparities in research capacity and infrastructure. Discussions will likely touch upon strategies for strengthening research institutions, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, and enhancing funding mechanisms across different regions. The insights shared and networks formed at this event can contribute to more equitable and sustainable development outcomes, aligning with broader international goals for scientific cooperation and capacity building.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for this conference should focus on understanding the current state of research and innovation management, particularly in emerging economies. Reviewing recent publications and policy documents from organizations involved in African scientific development will be beneficial. Consider how different national contexts, such as those in KEN, ZAF, or EGY, influence research priorities and management strategies. Analyzing successful case studies of innovation ecosystems, perhaps from countries like USA or DEU, could offer valuable comparative insights.

Participants should also be prepared to engage in discussions about the ethical dimensions of research and the importance of inclusive innovation. Understanding concepts like "gender-dynamics-across-cultures" and how they intersect with research practices will be crucial. Developing a strong understanding of "stakeholder-workshop" methodologies and "engagement-strategies" will allow for more effective participation in collaborative sessions and networking opportunities. Consider how your own work or interests align with the broader themes of fostering sustainable research environments and translating knowledge into actionable solutions.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 5 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Rwanda

Host nation, keen to showcase its advancements in science and technology and foster regional collaboration.

Role in topic

As the host country, RWA is positioned to highlight its progress in establishing a knowledge-based economy and its commitment to fostering research and innovation. The event provides an opportunity to attract international partnerships and investment in its scientific endeavors.

South Africa

Leading research powerhouse in Africa, likely to share best practices and seek new collaborations.

Role in topic

ZAF, with its established research infrastructure and significant scientific output, will likely contribute expertise on advanced research management techniques and strategies for commercializing innovation. It will also seek to strengthen ties with other African nations.

Kenya

Emerging innovation hub, interested in learning from others and showcasing its growing tech sector.

Role in topic

KEN is a rapidly developing innovation hub. Its representatives will be keen to share experiences in building a vibrant tech ecosystem and to learn from international best practices in research and innovation management to further accelerate its growth.

Nigeria

Significant contributor to African research, focused on scaling innovation for large populations.

Role in topic

NGA, with its large population and dynamic economy, plays a crucial role in African research. Its delegates will likely focus on strategies for managing large-scale research initiatives and translating innovation into solutions that address the needs of a diverse and extensive populace.

Uganda

Neighboring country, interested in regional integration and collaborative research initiatives.

Role in topic

UGA, as a neighboring country to RWA, will likely be interested in strengthening regional research collaborations and integrating its scientific efforts with those of other East African nations to achieve shared development goals.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Advancing Research and Innovation for African Socio-Economic Transformation

Africa's research and innovation (R&I) agenda has long been shaped by the gap between the continent's development aspirations and its underinvestment in science. The African Union's Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2024 (STISA-2024) set a target for member states to commit at least 1% of GDP to R&D, a benchmark only a handful of countries (notably South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya) have approached. Agenda 2063 and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) have reinforced the framing of R&I as a driver of structural transformation, moving economies away from raw commodity exports toward value addition, manufacturing, and a knowledge-based service sector. Despite progress through bodies such as the African Academy of Sciences, AOSTI, and regional research networks like EARIMA in East Africa, the continent still produces less than 3% of global research output and faces persistent brain drain, fragmented funding, and weak university-industry linkages. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed both the costs of dependence on imported technology and the latent capacity of African researchers when mobilised, prompting renewed political attention to home-grown innovation ecosystems. Today the debate centres on how to translate research outputs into measurable socio-economic gains: jobs, productivity, food security, and competitiveness. Discussions emphasise blended financing, regional centres of excellence, harmonised intellectual property regimes under ARIPO and OAPI, and stronger alignment between national research councils and the private sector.

Key players

Strengthening Research and Innovation in Bio-manufacturing

Bio-manufacturing — the use of biological systems to produce vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, enzymes, and bio-based industrial inputs — emerged as a strategic priority after COVID-19 exposed Africa's reliance on imported medical countermeasures. At the height of the pandemic, the continent imported roughly 99% of its vaccines, prompting the African Union and Africa CDC to launch the Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing (PAVM) initiative in 2021, with a target of producing 60% of vaccines used in Africa locally by 2040. Since then, initiatives such as the WHO mRNA Technology Transfer Hub in Cape Town, Institut Pasteur de Dakar's expansion, BioVac, and Rwanda's BioNTech facility have begun to reshape the landscape. However, bio-manufacturing remains capital-intensive and dependent on technology licensing, skilled human resources, regulatory harmonisation through the African Medicines Agency (AMA), and reliable demand through pooled procurement. Beyond health, agricultural biotech and industrial fermentation offer pathways to food security and bio-economy diversification. The core debate is how to build sustainable demand, secure technology transfer on fair terms, strengthen biosafety and bioethics oversight, and ensure that research universities feed talent and IP into commercial-scale facilities rather than remaining isolated from production.

Key players

Recalibrating Research and Innovation in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has rapidly become both a tool and an object of research, reshaping how scientific work is conducted, peer-reviewed, and disseminated. Large language models, AI-assisted literature review, automated data analysis, and generative tools have accelerated productivity but also surfaced concerns about research integrity, fabricated citations, data provenance, and the erosion of authorship norms. UNESCO's 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and the 2024 UN Global Digital Compact frame the multilateral baseline, while national AI strategies are proliferating across Africa, including in Rwanda, Egypt, Kenya, and South Africa. For African research systems, AI represents both opportunity and risk. It can compensate for thin specialist capacity, enable local-language NLP, and accelerate diagnostics and climate modelling; but reliance on foreign foundation models trained on non-representative data threatens epistemic dependence, and limited compute infrastructure constrains domestic model development. Open science, data sovereignty, and equitable access to compute have become central policy questions. The debate now is how universities, funders, and journals should adapt: revising research methods curricula, clarifying disclosure standards for AI use, investing in shared compute and African-language datasets, and building governance that allows experimentation without compromising integrity.

Key players

Advancing Technology Transfer for Industrial Transformation

Technology transfer — the movement of know-how, processes, and intellectual property from research institutions or foreign partners into productive industrial use — has been a recurring theme of African industrialisation since the Lagos Plan of Action (1980). The contemporary framing was sharpened by the AfCFTA, which entered force in 2021 and aims to expand intra-African trade in manufactured goods, and by the AU's call for regional value chains in pharmaceuticals, automotive, agro-processing, and green technologies. Globally, TRIPS flexibilities, the WTO's 2022 COVID-19 IP waiver decision, and ongoing debates around compulsory licensing have shaped how developing economies access proprietary technology. Within Africa, technology transfer offices (TTOs) at universities remain nascent, university-industry collaboration is uneven, and FDI-linked transfer is often limited to assembly rather than design or core process knowledge. Special economic zones, science parks, and innovation hubs have proliferated, but absorptive capacity in domestic firms remains a bottleneck. The central questions are how to strengthen TTOs and IP management at African universities, negotiate technology transfer clauses in trade and investment agreements, build skills pipelines that allow local firms to absorb transferred technology, and ensure transfer supports green and digital industrialisation rather than locking in obsolete processes.

Key players

Upgrading the Role of Research and Innovation in the Humanities

Research funding and policy attention globally have skewed heavily toward STEM, leaving the humanities — history, philosophy, languages, literature, area studies, and the arts — chronically underfunded even as societies grapple with questions of identity, ethics, governance, and meaning that are fundamentally humanistic. In Africa, the humanities carry additional significance: they underpin debates on decolonisation of knowledge, restitution of cultural heritage, indigenous languages, and the contested narratives of nationhood and pan-Africanism. Initiatives such as CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa), the African Humanities Program, and UNESCO's work on intangible cultural heritage have sustained the field, but precarity persists. The rise of generative AI has paradoxically raised the stakes: humanities expertise is essential for interpreting AI's social impacts, while at the same time AI threatens traditional humanities methods and labour markets. Recent restitution debates — including the return of Benin Bronzes and other cultural artefacts — have also underscored the policy relevance of humanities research. The debate focuses on how research councils can rebalance funding portfolios, how humanities scholarship can be integrated into innovation policy (including in design, policy analysis, and creative industries), and how African languages and epistemologies can be embedded in curricula, archives, and digital platforms.

Key players

Managing Research and Innovation Grants

The management of research grants has become a defining capability for African research institutions as external funding has grown more complex. Major funders — including the EU's Horizon Europe, the Wellcome Trust, the NIH, the Gates Foundation, the IDRC, the Science for Africa Foundation, and bilateral donors — now demand sophisticated financial systems, compliance with anti-bribery and export-control regimes, conflict-of-interest disclosures, open-access mandates, and detailed monitoring frameworks. Domestic instruments such as Kenya's National Research Fund, Rwanda's NCST grants, and South Africa's NRF have similarly professionalised. Many African universities, however, still struggle with weak pre-award and post-award offices, limited indirect cost recovery, unreliable financial reporting, and difficulties retaining grants management specialists. High-profile cases of mismanagement or audit findings have damaged institutional reputations and triggered tighter donor controls. Initiatives like the Good Financial Grant Practice (GFGP) standard, championed by the African Academy of Sciences, aim to standardise institutional capacity. The emerging agenda focuses on building professionalised grants offices, harmonising financial and ethical compliance across institutions, supporting early-career researchers to access funding, ensuring fair indirect cost rates, and reducing the administrative burden that diverts researchers from science itself.

Key players

Amplifying Research and Innovation Ethics

Research ethics in Africa has evolved significantly since the controversies of the 1990s and 2000s around clinical trials conducted on the continent, which prompted reforms in informed consent, community engagement, and ethical review. National ethics committees, institutional review boards, and bodies such as the African Vaccine Regulatory Forum (AVAREF) now oversee a growing volume of research. Frameworks include the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) guidelines, the Declaration of Helsinki, and the AU Model Law on Medical Research. New technologies have widened the ethical frontier. Genomic research, biobanking, and data-sharing raise questions of benefit sharing and sovereignty, addressed in part by the H3Africa initiative's policies. AI in research surfaces concerns about algorithmic bias, synthetic data, and authorship. Social science research grapples with informed consent in digital ethnography and surveillance contexts. Meanwhile, the rise of predatory journals, paper mills, and AI-generated content has put research integrity under unprecedented strain. The core debate is how to scale ethics review capacity without creating bottlenecks, harmonise standards across borders for multi-country studies, integrate emerging-technology ethics (AI, gene editing, neurotechnology) into existing frameworks, and ensure that ethics oversight is genuinely independent, well-resourced, and grounded in African values rather than imported wholesale.

Key players