The European Commission is aiming to extend the network of the ENRICH centres in USA, Brazil and China to cover other regions, in order to connect European researchers and entrepreneurs globally. The ENRICH in Africa (EiA) project is addressing this challenge by establishing the EiA Centre, targeting the sub-Saharan African region. Focus of the activities will be the set-up of a network of incubators and accelerators to deliver services to European and African innovators. To best deliver this model, the EiA consortium brings together active innovation ecosystem actors from across the EU and Africa, who, together, have co-created a business model that offers them, as customers, what they need; a strong value proposition and beneficial services. This foundation offers a strong revenue model that can ensure a legacy for the commitment provided by the European Commission through this grant. Utilising this co-creation ethos EiA brings together incubators and accelerators across the EU and Africa to act as Champions for EiA. The network, in the beginning comprising of EiA consortium members, will be expanded to other entrepreneurial support organisations that meet the EiA standards. Key element of the concept is the focus on capacity building and learning for incubators and accelerators in order for them be able to offer high quality services to innovators. The EiA multi-sided platform, with a clever digital backbone, will be the central point for all EiA activities, offering different services for a wide range of stakeholders in the EU-Africa innovation ecosystem. This project offers a testable framework, which will be piloted in the initial stage of the project timeframe, leading into an evaluation and subsequent centre implementation phase, which will see the roll out of the piloted project to its full commercial capacity, ensuring that the EiA Centre will be carried forward beyond the lifetime of the project.

Go-Lab goes Africa: GO-GA’s main objective is to adapt and implement the successful Go-Lab Learning Ecosystem in Africa, first piloting in 3 countries and then scaling up to more users and more countries. The Go-Lab ecosystem, as developed in the FP7 Go-Lab project and now being further developed and implemented in Europe in the ongoing H2020 Next-Lab project, offers students rich, challenging, and socially embedded science and technology experiences that shape their science and technology knowledge, together with reflective and social abilities. By starting at a young age, Go-Lab intends to increase the enrollment in science and technology education, by offering engaging instruction its aims to decrease the level of dropout of students, and by combining inquiry and 21st century skills it expects to contribute to a better-equipped workforce. All these benefits are dearly needed in Africa too; therefore thanks to the opportunity of call ICT-39-2016-2017, the purpose of the GO-GA project is to take Go-Lab outside of Europe, to adapt its ecosystem to African requirements and to roll it out on the African continent, which cannot go without an extensive training of teachers in pedagogical and technical skills. For the technical and pedagogical aspects, GO-GA builds on the developments as achieved in the Go-Lab project and currently continued in the H2020 Next-Lab project. Increasingly, resources/content available for STEM Education are designed for the developed world. Effective adoption in the developing world will mean adapting the content to fit within the constraints of developing countries; such as taking into consideration availability and type of devices, lack of steady power supply and affordable and reliable internet access. Thus, the GO-GA project will see the effective adaptation of the Go-Lab ecosystem, delivered by a community of trained, local teachers, and piloted in Nigeria, Kenya and Benin Republic, and subsequently scaling to 4 other African countries.