Frances Weiß and Patrick Wirz attended the “International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Innovative Business Practices for the Transformation of Societies”. The event took place August 3-6, 2016, in Mauritius. The conference welcomed over 100 participants from Africa, Asia and other parts of the world and covered various topics spanning from technology-based educational systems to web technologies, cloud computing and big data analytics to innovative technologies for smart enterprises growth.

The main objective of Frances Weiß’ and Patrick Wirz’ participation was to present the paper “Towards a Framework for Overcoming the Challenges of a Sustainable ERP Education at Higher Education Institutions in sub-Saharan Africa” authored by Catharina Zschieck and themselves. The talk should give some meaningful input for similar project endeavors and put the ESEFA on the radar of potential new partners. In her presentation, Frances Weiß addressed the challenges of Enterprise Resource Planning education in sub-Saharan Africa, highlighted the importance of sustainability considerations during the course of the project and proposed ESEFA’s approach to overcoming problems concerning successful ERP education. The ensuing questions and discussions signified that both the topic and the project had caught the attention of the audience. The paper will be published in the IEEE EmergiTech 2016 Conference Proceedings.

The small OVGU delegation not only followed several other inspiring talks but also used the opportunity to strengthen the ESEFA network. Besides chatting about ESEFA with fellow conference participants, Patrick Wirz and Frances Weiß also got together with ESEFA manager Gwamaka Mwalemba as well as Dinesh Kumar Hurreeram and Callychurn Shahill from the ESEFA partner, University of Mauritius. They discussed the current project status and possible future development and collaboration opportunities.

For more information see: http://www.emergitech2016.org