Reinforcing cooperation and strategic partnerships to support the strengthening of existing Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) in Africa and facilitating the collaboration between European and African DIHs to strengthen a common EU-Africa innovation and start-up ecosystem. A policy recommendation paper. Insights and learnings from the ICT-58 projects.

In 2019 the European Union (EU) launched the call Information and Communication Technologies (H2020-ICT-2018-20) under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. The call addressed the objec-tive “to reinforce cooperation and strategic partnership with selected countries in Africa to support the strengthening of existing Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) in Africa and to facilitate the collaboration between European and African DIHs in order to strengthen a common EU-Africa innovation and start-up ecosystem.”  A total of six projects were funded under this call: AEDIB|NET (Innovation Action, IA), AfriConEU (IA), DIGILOGIC (IA), HUBiquitous (IA), IDEA D4D Hub (CSA), mAkE (IA). Each of the pro-jects has their individual objectives contributing to the overall goal of the call. 

This paper is the result of a close collaboration between four projects of the ICT-58 call funded under the Horizon2020 programme of the European Union. It showcases learnings that have been shared between the projects through joint meetings over the course of their runtime and builds the final step in this exemplary collaboration. This consolidation of learnings is a starting point for others to build on and intended to further facilitate and motivate the collaboration and development of DIHs in Africa and Europe in the future.