Indigenous knowledge in Africa, and the world over, is expressed in language, and usually in an "indigenous" language - in short, the mother tongue of inhabitants of the locality, or a lingua franca in regular usage by them. Are these languages simply a neutral medium? Are they just instrumental...

Though the development, articulation, and systematization of indigenous knowledge in Africa are most often seen as issues of culture and local epistemology, they have at the same time critical power dimensions. The relation between local knowledge bases - and practitioners - on the one hand and...

While often modern technology tends to bypass local communities in remote regions, recent technological advancements in communications have erased geographical distances, and infra-structural bottlenecks: located in some fifty kilometers north of Kampala, Uganda, in a remote village, the...

The note looks at the work of a regional task force in East, and Southern Africa, established on April 2000 to coordinate activities related to the widespread use of traditional medicine, by people with HIV/AIDS in the region, and on the role of traditional healers in AIDS prevention. The high...

Based on research from an evaluation of functional adult literacy during the late 70s, focused on peanut-growing in the western region of Mali, results demonstrated that while literacy programs only attained its full quantitative objectives in just a few localities, the vast majority of...

In the context of globalization, local African products already in high demand, could be successfully marketed nationally, and internationally. This holds true for the traditional sugar cane wine making in parts of West Africa, namely, Angola, Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The...

One of the down-sides of worldwide agricultural development, has been the replacement of native plant species by marketable crops, accompanied by a reduction in the diversity of the seed stock. This accounts for the disappearance of plants with potential medicinal uses, particularly in high...

Indigenous knowledge in West African schools, has yet to gain its stand in the official education sector in order to certify knowledge, and train the next generation, a sector seemingly unlikely to embrace local knowledge, or regard indigenous science as a legitimate source of inspiration....

The note identifies the essential ingredients - employment, meaning, and self-direction - through examples that represent efforts to fill the void in apprenticeship of adult roles, for impoverished young people thrown out of a traditional framework, and into the vortex of African cities. And...

The note emphasizes the critical importance of documenting indigenous knowledge in writing, which can then be used to challenge a patent claim on knowledge that is already in the public domain. It also highlights the usefulness of other forms of intellectual property rights, other than patents,...