‘Decisive issues’ tackled at Marseille summit on African tech

Over 2 300 participants, 150 start-ups and 50 investors from 70 countries are expected at EMERGING Valley, a major annual gathering of the African-European tech industry. The event is scheduled for 28 and 29 November in Marseille, France.

Organisers say EMERGING Valley will be at the heart of decisive issues this year in the wake of serious geopolitical and climatic upheavals that are destabilising the world and creating emergency issues in energy, food production, health and the environment.

Co-innovation and digital sovereignty are the main focus where young African entrepreneurs will show how they are joining forces and working to address these unprecedented challenges that the world is facing, with a key focus on co-developing high-impact solutions.

Founded by Samir Abdelkrim, author of Startup Lions, at the heart of African Tech, EMERGING Valley has become the international summit where key tech and innovative entrepreneurship stakeholders from Africa and Europe put their heads together.

“The geopolitical and environmental situation has never been so fragile. This is why now, more than ever, innovative companies need to unite and accelerate their development to have a genuine impact on essential issues such as digital, food and energy sovereignty,” said Abdelkrim.

“This is also why EMERGING Valley is has revamped itself this year to develop its themes and explore new challenges linked to Afro-European co-innovation. It will also be hosting several prestigious highlights to promote the most promising high-impact projects. 2022 shall be a pivotal year where the world must come together to reinvent itself, and above all build projects together.”

The programme will focus on several key themes, some of which are new, with a common emphasis on co-innovation and co-sovereignty. This includes:

• Energy and digital sovereignty: how can we ensure “clean” energy security thanks to digital innovations from Africa, while adapting to geopolitical hinderances that disrupt supply chains.
• Food and agri-tech sovereignty: in an unstable geopolitical and climatic context where shortages loom, how can we respond to food and nutrition issues for the populations of Africa and the world with agritech?
• Women entrepreneurship: ever increasingly, the future of African Tech is being written by the continent’s female entrepreneurs, particularly in the Mediterranean, who are especially creative and strong-minded.

Due to its geographical position which naturally places it at the epicentre of exchanges between the two shores of the Mediterranean, the Aix-Marseille-Provence territory plays a historic and central role between Africa and Europe.

EMERGING Valley celebrates this unique territory by organising the annual highlight where Marseille brings together all of Africa’s innovation, to speak to the world and scale up one topic in particular: co-innovation.

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