Abdelhamid Benhmade wins Global Affairs Canada’s International Policy Ideas Competition

Technology Law, Ethics and Policy
Aerial view of the University of Ottawa Campus and the Rideau Canal.
The Centre for Law, Technology and Society is delighted to announce that Abdelhamid Benhmade, PhD candidate and Open AIR researcher, is one of the winners of Global Affairs Canada’s 2020 International Policy Ideas Competition for his project “Africa, a source of growth for Canadian businesses”.
Abdelhamid Benhmade

In collaboration with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Global Affairs Canada (GAC) organized the International Policy Ideas Challenge to identify concrete innovative solutions to emerging international policy challenges faced by Canada. The objective of the program is to draw on the network of talented Canadian graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and early-career civil society researchers to identify concrete, innovative solutions to emerging international policy challenges faced by Canada.

Abdelhamid Benhmade is one of ten winners selected from across Canada to further develop his proposal into a policy statement, which will then be presented to Government of Canada officials.

The objective of his research is to explore the economic functions of African global cities in the internationalization of Canadian firms to Africa. North Africa is one African region that receives the most foreign investment. 40% of the top twenty African urban destinations are North African, including Cairo, Tangier, Casablanca, Algiers, Rabat, Marrakech, Tunis and Oran. Among these, only Cairo, Casablanca, Algiers and Tunis are included in the Globalization and World Cities Research Network's ranking of global cities. Continentally, Casablanca ranks third after Johannesburg and Cairo, suggesting that it is one of the major urban gateways to Africa. Hence the interest in conducting a case study on the functions it performs for Canadian companies operating in Africa.

Abdelhamid Benhmade is pursuing his PhD in International Development at the University of Ottawa and is a researcher at Open AIR where he contributes to academic activities involving entrepreneurship and innovation in Africa. His doctoral research is focused on the development and the private sector. He pays particular attention to two main areas of research, namely the geo-economics of global cities and international entrepreneurship. His passion for international business led him to conduct a thesis on African global cities and their role in the internationalization of Canadian firms.

It is worth noting that this is the third time that winners of this prestigious competition include emergent researchers from the Centre: Laura Garcia and Amìr Korhani in 2017 and Ghazaleh Jerban in 2019! We are very proud of this national recognition of the excellence in public policy research of our emerging researchers!

Congratulations to our emergent researcher!