The Network for the Coordination and Advancement of Sub-Saharan Africa-EU Science & Technology Cooperation has organised its second stakeholder conference bringing policy makers and research organisations across Africa and Europe together to debate on the theme of ‘Steps to Innovation’.

The conference program included a one-day workshop for coordinators of the projects funded by the FP7 coordinated call for Africa with the aim of forming clusters for cooperation.

A multi-disciplinary approach is needed to adequately address global challenges. The Africa Call takes the first step by funding research projects from three different themes that collectively contribute to addressing articulated African priorities. However, to truly achieve a multi-disciplinary approach, efforts must be taken to find synergies and complementarities between projects in all of the themes.

The representatives of four water-related projects (WATERBIOTECH, AfroMaison, CLARA and WHaTeR) have concluded to join forces with the main objectives to facilitate the dissemination and exploitation of the results towards high-level African stakeholders to ensure long-term impact of results and to add-value to the outputs & findings of the individual projects. To achieve this an agenda and strategy is being devised. The coordinators will meet again in October 2012 in Cairo.