Côte d'Ivoire to revive pan-African technology magazine

ARCT hopes to ensure TechnoDev's relevance to development debates across Africa

Flickr/BBC World Service

[DAKAR] The African Regional Centre for Technology (ARCT), a research agency headquartered in Senegal, plans to revive a magazine geared towards disseminating scientific research to communities across Africa.

TechnoDev, a pan-African magazine on technological innovation, will be launched by the end of the year.  

ARCT stopped publishing the magazine in 2010 for financial reasons.

The new magazine — which will be published in hard copy and will be made available free in English and French — will cover a wide range of science subjects, and content will be written by researchers. It will be targeted to the government, the scientific community and the general public.  

By covering diverse subjects for a wide audience, ARCT hopes to ensure the magazine's enduring popularity and relevance to communities and development in countries across Africa.

ARCT's executive board has now made TechnoDev's production a management priority, in order to secure funding for the magazine. The publication has also received funding from ARCT's 31 member countries, drawn from across the continent.

According to Abderrahim Doumar, ARCT's executive director, TechnoDev will act as a tool for promoting science and technology activities. It will work to identify potential ARCT regional projects, programmes and partnerships, and find funding for future projects and training.

He explained that TechnoDev will also act as an exchange platform between the institution and its partners, local representatives, member states and regional agencies.

Doumar said that ARCT has secured funding for the project. It has also conducted extensive research into the magazine's potential content, identified editorial staff, formed a scientific committee, and established "a distribution network […] to cover the whole continent".  

Cyprien Kodjo, a researcher at Côte d'Ivoire's national polytechnic institute, Félix Houphouet Boigny,  welcomed the relaunch, and said that the absence of the magazine had created an emptiness in the world of research and technological innovation in Africa.

"We hope that the magazine will also be an efficient instrument for encouraging, reinforcing and coordinating capacity and technological strategies, at the national, sub-regional and regional level," Kodjo said.