The overall goal of the project is to initiate, design, and implement the Navel logistics innovation center Ngaoundéré in cooperation with the logistics team led by Professor Victor Tsapi at the University of Ngaoundéré in Cameroon. This center supports and promotes the generation of knowledge and experience about innovative technologies and organizational models as well as their transfer within the framework of contract research.

The center will work with large as well as small and medium-sized companies, especially in Cameroon, in order to promote economically and socially sustainable development. The Navel Logistics Innovation Center is integrated into the Innovation Center of Excellence at the University of Ngaoundéré but focuses in particular on engineering and business logistics. The project will strengthen the networks of cooperation between business, science, and administration in logistics in the region, and strengthen structures and mechanisms of culturally influenced and regional political cooperation in order to make better use of knowledge transfer, market innovations, and research results in Cameroon and the Adamaoua region to implement.

Against this background, the project and the innovation center harmonize with the Africa Strategy of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research to strengthen the networking of science and business in order to increase the application-orientation of research and the exploitation of research results and thus economic development in Africa to support. The center is named after the Mbum word of the nearby Navel mountain to show the close relationship between the center and its contributors to regional culture and geography.

The Navel project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), July 2020 – June 2022 (extended until beginning of 2023), 01DG20011