The African continent faces enormous challenges related to demographics, climate change, employment, corruption, lack of infrastructure, inclusion in global value chains, and so on. To overcome these challenges, people and policy makers need to be accompanied by African research structures. It is a challenge, a great responsibility, but also a noble one for African researchers.

As the new theories of the growth economy already support, moreover the principal author of these theories received the Nobel Prize of economy in 2018, the research and the innovation are the main engine of the economic, social and environmental progress.

Research that is limited to understanding the laws of nature and social phenomena without proposing operational solutions for development, especially in the African context, is an unfulfilled search.

In this context, CARDES has the ambition to produce new ideas, empirical evidence and new solutions to Africa's development challenge.