Valdai Club

Russia is ready to cooperate with African countries in all areas that involve their use. At the same time, from our point of view, the most significant of these areas will be the following: information security, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence, Konstantin Pantserev writes.

According to African governments, public-private partnerships are expected to play a crucial role in the development of innovation centres. These partnerships involve the state covering only a small portion of the overall costs associated with the construction of these centres, typically around 5-10%. The success of these projects largely depends on private companies, which are expected to get a favourable environment for their operations, Konstantin Pantserev writes.

The problem of ensuring peace and security continues to be one of the key challenges facing African countries, which, of course, creates certain obstacles to sustainable development. Protests in Africa vary in nature and intensity. In some countries they have developed into a protracted civil war between various factions, while in other countries they’ve managed to proceed with fewer casualties.

Technological innovations that African states are so proud of are often based on Western technologies, and the world’s largest IT companies, such as Microsoft, IBM and Google, under the pretext of introducing and localising their innovative technical solutions into the IT sector of African countries strive to gain a strong foothold in the promising African market, writes
Konstantin Pantserev.

Russia is extremely interested in making education accessible to Africans. Today, according to various estimates, about 35,000 students from Africa study at Russian universities. In order to make education in Russia more accessible to students from Africa, the Russian-African Network University was created in August 2021, in which 12 Russian universities participate, Konstantin Pantserev writes.