The Pan African University Institute for Water and Energy Sciences including Climate Change (PAUWES) in Algeria contributes to promoting higher education and applied research in the fields of water, energy and climate change – a key contribution to sustainable development in Africa. The admissions process for its four master programs (engineering and policy) starting in September 2017 is now open. All AU citizens (including diaspora) are encouraged to apply, especially candidates from under-represented regions at PAUWES and women.

In 2008, the African Union Commission (AUC) set up the Pan African University (PAU) (https://PAU-AU.net) to strengthen higher education and research in areas that pose particular challenges for Africa. PAU addresses five thematic areas: Basic Sciences, Technology and Innovation; Life and Earth Sciences (including Health and Agriculture), Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences; Water and Energy Sciences including Climate Change (PAUWES); and Space Sciences. The thematic areas are assigned to five flagship institutes hosted by existing universities of excellence across Africa’s five geographic regions

Graduates from PAUWES benefit from a wide variety of career prospects. Equipped with theoretical and practical knowledge, they are ready to become leaders in public administration, policy-making, research, private enterprise, consulting or civil society organisation. The access to the Institute’s international network of experts provides additional momentum to the graduates’ careers.

Career-promotion programmes are offered for job entry. All PAUWES students receive full scholarships (covering tuition and living expenses) following a competitive admission process.

Application 
Interested students are invited to apply until May 31, 2017 under the following link:
https://PAU-AU.net/en/admissions

The previous wave of digital disruption, triggered by mobile technology, caught most CIOs and organisations off guard.

10 years ago, hardly anyone owned a smartphone. Today, there are around 2 billion in circulation. What’s more, we use them every day to access Uber, WhatsApp, Instagram and many other services that didn’t exist when the first iPhone was released in 2007.

Yet we are only at the start of a digital technology revolution that will profoundly change how we live and work in the next five years. With artificial intelligence, FinTech (especially blockchain) and the Internet of Things coming of age, we can expect digital disruption to accelerate in the years to come.

The previous wave of digital disruption, triggered by mobile technology, caught most CIOs and organisations off guard. Many industry incumbents lost market share to new-age technology companies or experienced declines in brand value and customer satisfaction because they couldn’t keep pace with the demands of a changing customer and employee.

This time, CIOs should ensure that they’re better prepared. The difficulty is that we don’t really know where the technology will take us. We have a vague sense of the direction, but no clear view of the destination.

Thriving in a world of unrelenting change

Against this backdrop of unrelenting change, the only way to survive is to embrace a culture of innovation. Rather than encouraging teams to ‘stick to the rules’, organisations should be ready to experiment, to fail fast, and be able to recover quickly from failure. As futurist Graeme Codrington put it in a recent Sage podcast: “The single most important thing you can do to be responsive to change is to experiment – leaders need to create a mindset and a structure that makes constant experimentation possible”

CIOs are now expected to guide the entire business through new ways of working. After all, an IDC Survey reveals  that more than 40% of line-of-business executives view the CIO as the Chief Innovation Officer.

As the people with their fingers on technology’s pulse, they should embrace their role of championing innovation and agility in the business. It’s not as easy as it seems. Aside from the actual technology, they need to start creating an open, collaborative culture where digital natives can grow well. For constant change to work, it also means using today’s open business management solutions and the power of the cloud to quickly and cost-effectively build out new apps and services. And of course, continual upskilling of the entire team  will be needed to keep up – this should happen on a daily basis and should be part of the culture – waiting for annual training seminars simply won’t cut it anymore.

We’re lucky to live in a time where huge technical infrastructures and a massive IT team are no longer necessary to access world-class technology. Deployment is also fast, provided companies are running an open platform that allows them to easily plug in other services and apps via an API.

IoT on tap

Do you want to digitise your factory floor processes and machines to increase automation? Well, today, Internet of Things sensors are cheap and open, and it’s easy to provision a software solution from the cloud using nothing more than a credit card. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not the end of the world because you have made no heavy infrastructure investments.

Today, testing new technologies is easier, faster and less risky than ever before. In fact, the risk today is not experimenting, not trying new things and not failing fast. Companies that are not keeping up with the pace of change could find themselves left behind by a changing world—just think about what happened to Kodak after digital cameras and DVD stores after Netflix.

By Keith Fenner , Vice President: Sage Enterprise Africa & Middle East. Was initially published as “Africa: CIOs should embrace the role of championing innovation and agility in the business”

Innovation can come from any place. A secondary school student in Mexico whose mother suffered breast cancer losing both breasts has designed a bra that helps detect breast cancer.

Called ‘EVA’, the bra is designed with approximately 200 biosensors embedded in the material, to map the surface of the wearer’s breast and monitor it over time for changes in temperature, size, and weight. The latter two are an integral part of standard breast cancer exams, so including them was a no-brainer. The additional temperature sensor, meanwhile, he says helps spot areas of increased blood flow, which could indicate a tumour gestating.

There are about 1,700,000 cases of breast cancer diagnosed every year. About 8,200,000 women die from it yearly and in the development world, it takes about 8 months before treatment. So this product is indeed very vital in the fight against breast cancer. They just have to make sure that the sensors which are embedded in the bra are safe.

Brilliant indeed and hope he can commercialize them to save more lives.