Energy cooperation in Southern Africa: What role for Norway?

This Working Paper contains a full report from a Seminar on Regional Energy Co-operation, Luanda, 12-14 February 2002. Norwegian involvement in the energy sector in Southern Africa is considerable. Energy is a major area in Norwegian co-operation and includes a number of countries within SADC. There has been rapid change in the sector, which has moved from being an infrastructure sector to a commodity production sector. Also, the ongoing institutional changes in SADC will have an effect on its relation to energy. The donors' role must change accordingly. Important objectives of the seminar were to discuss the changes in the sector in the region and to improve the level of information in order to make better decisions.

The Commons Concept and Intellectual Property Rights Regime: Whither Plant Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge?

[Excerpt] The classification of plant genetic resources (PGRs) as the common heritage of humankind continues to generate controversies. The debate is between developing countries that are the primary sources of these resources and industrialized, biotechnologically advanced countries that appropriate and utilize PGRs as raw materials for various commercial products, such as medicine, seed variety, or pesticides. Scholars of diverse backgrounds express various opinions on whether PGRs obtained from plants found within a territory of a sovereign state should properly be designated “common heritage of humankind” or regarded as part of the “commons,” and therefore freely accessible. The debate also extends to and challenges the status of traditional knowledge on the uses of PGRs. The dominant but not necessarily the correct view is that such knowledge is information in the public domain, incapable of private ownership or control

Energy Power, Digital Infrastructure and Elearning Platforms: Afrrican Experience.

Information and communication technologies are one of the most pervasive technologies in the world, second only to 'human intelligence' or the human brain. Thus, understanding the factors that determine the diffusion of new technologies across african countries is important to understanding the process of economic development. And whereas, energy is linked with the capacity to perform, the rate at which energy is consumed for the acceleration of the pace of socio-economic activities is regarded as power. Consequently, it will be obvious that the magnitude of the standard of living in any society; the growth and development of such an economy; and its ability to affect the course of events(such as ICT revolution)will be a function of the extent to which its energy(power) resources are developed and utilised. This paper therefore argued for the need to provide assistance in reducing vulnerability and building the capacity of african countries to more widely reap the benefits of the clean development mechanism in areas such as the development of cleaner and renewable energies. Inevitably, this is the critical condition for the sustainability of the emergent e-learning platforms and digital networks in africa.ICT, learning, elearning, development, energy, power, information, communication, solar, electricity, wind, governance, africa, electronics, telecommunications, internet, digital, satellite, renewable energy, gas turbine, power plants, bandwidth, coal, hydro, biomass, steam, transmission, distribution, utilisation

A Renewable Energy Plan for Mozambique

Mozambique has among the lowest uses of electricity in the world. Yet virtually all of the electricity it does produce from Cahora Bassa Dam on the Zambezi is shipped to its wealthy neighbor, South Africa. As the government prepares to build another costly large dam on the Zambezi that will also power South Africa rather than homes and businesses in Mozambique, a new report lays out a saner plan for developing renewable energy sources across the nation that would share the energy wealth more equitably; diversify the national electricity grid to help the nation adapt to climate change (which is expected to significantly affect large hydro), and build a clean energy sector that would also spare the Zambezi

Epidemic space

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of 'spatiality' in understanding the materialization of risk society and cultivation of risk sensibilities. More specifically it provides a cultural analysis of pathogen virulence (as a social phenomenon) by means of tracing and mapping the spatial flows that operate in the uncharted zones between the microphysics of infection and the macrophysics of epidemics. It will be argued that epidemic space consists of three types of forces: the vector, the index and the vortex. It will draw on Latour's Actor Network Theory to argue that epidemic space is geared towards instability when the vortex (of expanding associations and concerns) displaces the index (of finding a single cause)

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Mining-related national systems of innovation in southern Africa: National trajectories and regional integration

This paper explores the linkages between the national systems of innovation of Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe and their respective mineral extraction and mineral processing value chains, including input industries. Our analysis reveals four individual national systems of innovation, with different outcomes in terms of engineering skills development, technical vocational education and training, research and development, innovation capabilities, and competitiveness of the domestic engineering consultancy services. These national systems of innovation are tentatively interconnected as an embryonic regional system of innovation, including institutional relationships, cross-border investment flows, flows of mining-related goods and services, and intra-Southern African Development Community flows of students, lecturers, technicians, and engineers. Notwithstanding important dynamics related to skills development and competence building happening across borders, more collaborative and synergistic initiatives between government, industry, and teaching and research institutions are required to shape a more balanced and coherent regional systems of innovation

Biomass

In the last century, biomass fuels - mostly wood - provided most of the world's energy. Today biomass in all its forms (wood, dung, and agricultural and forest residues) supplies about 14 percent of our energy - most of it in developing countries, where biomass is the most common energy source. Biomass provides more than a quarter of China's energy, for example. Rural areas in most developing countries depend heavily on biomass for energy. A dearth of biomass energy usually indicates other developmental and environmental problems. The difficulty in trying to ameliorate such problems is that bioenergy may not be a priority for local communities,which have more pressing problems or are unable to take the longer-term view toward rehabilitating their biomass resources. But outside energy experts tend to focus on one aspect of biomass use to the exclusion of all others, and therefore many biomass energy projects and programs fail. The author presents case studies showing that local involvement and control is a prerequisite for the success of such programs. There is an enormous untapped potential for biomass, and bioenergy systems may be less irreversibly damaging to the environment than conventional fossil fuels. Bioenergy systems produce many but mostly local and relatively small impacts on the environment and their impact is more controllable. There is no short-cut, however, to long-term planning and development of biomass energy systems. And the barriers are many: economic, social, and technological. Modernizing biomass technologies, for example - so biomass can be used for liquid fuel, electricity, and gas (in addition to its traditional use as a heat source) - involves land use issues that make implementation of biomass projects more difficult than projects involving more centralized energy resources. But both traditional and modernizied biomass energy systems need developing to produce preferred forms such as heat, electricity, and liquids. Biomass energy should be modernized more rapidly, and at the same time traditional biomass fuels should be produced and used as efficiently as possible - both in a sustainable manner.Sanitation and Sewerage,TF030632-DANISH CTF - FY05 (DAC PART COUNTRIES GNP PER CAPITA BELOW USD 2,500/AL,Energy and Environment,Montreal Protocol,Climate Change