An award that rewards an initiative developed in Africa.
"Norbert Ségard was a physicist, an inventor, a member of Parliament, and a minister too, who made a significant contribution to the promotion of science education and laboratory training.
He created schools directly from his knowledge as a physicist. And then he created State projects directly from what he had learnt from his two previous activities. In France, we have such a powerful wired Internet, because he was Minister of Telecommunications in the 1970s.
He was also a man of truth. At the end of his life he had lung cancer and in the 1980s it was taboo. He was the first to come on a public broadcast and tell about it, for prevention. So Norbert Ségard was a character who brought together a number of values.
When he died in 1981, his friends decided to create a foundation. This foundation has always been focused on youth. It has funded many PhDs in basic research. But for the past 10 years, his son, who has taken over the presidency, has decided to look to the future, which is to say: "we will support more innovation and projects of technological companies resulting from laboratories". What is now called Deep Techs.
Since I became vice-president of the foundation, I have convinced the president that the future, if we want to accelerate even further, is Africa. And so we created this experimental award, because we are also experimenters, which is called the "Afrique innovante" award.
And I thank the organizers, Luc Allemand in particular, but all those who support the YASE conference, for backing this award. It is co-sponsored by the Fondation Norbert Ségard, which has provided expertise to evaluate the very good applications. And also with APSA.
Today we are very happy to give an award for the first time to someone who lives in Africa, who works in Africa and who has set up a project in Africa.
She is a winner: we are very happy to give the prize to Miss, or Madam, Arielle Kitio-Tsamo for the CAYSTI project and I invite her to come and talk about it."