Keynote Reveal: Global Innovation

In his global innovation talk, Kheston Walkins outlines the importance of seeing the Global South as entirely capable of innovating, creating and changing the world.

In his speech, the Trinidadian PhD student addressed the problems with the narrow lens that people outside of the Global South view its capabilities. These nations are seen as unable to innovate and create, and even when they do they are believed to have received foreign help. Walkins outlines his own research in creating an online diagnostic system that significantly shortens the wait times that cancer patients must go through to receive official diagnoses – with current wait times too often meaning the difference between life and death. In his speech, Walkins speaks of the unwarranted negative perceptions that outsiders have of the Global South's ability to innovate, while pointing to himself as just one of many examples of how this is a false perception.

Kheston Walkins is a walking embodiment of the vast knowledge and capacities of people from the Global South, and he points out the fact that by discounting entire regions due to their perceived lack of "development," the world could miss out on groundbreaking discoveries.