AUSTRIA, July 10 - On 11 July 2022, Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg and Federal Minister for the EU and the Constitution Karoline Edtstadler attended the award ceremony for the first ever Kofi Annan Award for Innovation in Africa, which was held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. The award attracted 330 entries from a total of 38 African countries, all of which were focused on the issue of digital health. The expert judging panel awarded three innovative winners. The prize-winning social entrepreneurs can look forward to 250,000 euros each in funding to help them continue their work.

The first award went to Flare, a project designed to improve access to emergency services in Africa. Only 5% of African households can currently contact the emergency services directly. Flare, a digital platform based in Kenya, aims to change that and ensure that the work of the emergency services is coordinated more effectively. The other winners are MyPaddi, a discrete advice network set up in Nigeria for young people interested in sexual health, and Zimbabwe's Vaxiglobal project, which helps vaccination campaigns to run smoothly by using security-based analysis of biometric data to provide the population with online vaccination passports.

Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg noted that recent geopolitical developments posed major challenges for the whole world, and particularly for Africa. The shockwaves of Russia's war in Ukraine were still being felt. In his concluding remarks at the end of the award ceremony, he commented:

There is a risk that much of the progress we have made in recent years on development and healthcare could be undone. On top of that, we are facing Russia's blockade of food exports, which may develop into a humanitarian crisis, especially in North Africa. The projects that have won awards today represent creative, innovation solutions in the face of Putin's cynicism.