This launch week marks the birth of the Ethics and Public Policy Laboratory (EthicsLab), a research center and think-tank at the Catholic University of Central Africa in Yaoundé created to pursue these goals.

This has been a long and exciting journey that started at the Hoover Chair of the Catholic University of Louvain, where the Yaoundé Seminars were conceived by a group of young doctoral students. The Institute for Business Ethics of the University of St.Gallen played a key role in the transition from the
Yaoundé Seminars to the establishment of EthicsLab. The cherry on the cake came in the form of the unwavering support of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, which helped us cross the finish line. That we are here today is because of these institutions (and others) as well as the
people behind them.

To mark EthicsLab’s institutional birth, this launch event is organized around three main activities:

a) the Berggruen Workshop, featuring public lectures and new research by Harvard’s three Berggruen Fellows and commentaries from nine young African scholars;
b) an International Conference, featuring five keynote lectures and ten parallel roundtables, and
c) panels on building an institutionally strong EthicsLab.

EthicsLab is a first-of-its-kind institution, a site dedicated to anchor academic and public debates on pressing ethical and political issues that the central Africa sub-region faces. It aspires to be a hub of excellence, providing high quality research in the domain of fundamental and applied ethics. It will build on the philosophical traditions in Cameroon and other African countries to define its scientific agenda, free from political pressure. EthicsLab will do so by giving a voice to African perspectives on moral and political theories, which is seriously lacking in philosophical debates. We aim to revive the political and academic agency of African societies, undermined in the past by slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and today by neo-liberal proclamations of international aid and some forms of political liberalism. We will do so by supporting and training a new generation of young, high-quality African political theorists and ethicists ready to devote themselves to the numerous challenges of the central African sub-region and Africa more broadly. Our scientific agenda will focus on five pillars: Ethics and Health; Ethics and Education; Ethics and the Environment; Ethics, Business and Economy; and Ethics and Politics.

EthicsLab is a new platform that belongs to all of us and will become what we make it to be. Let us take advantage of its existence. Let us ask ourselves not (just) what other (rich) countries can do for us, but what we can do ourselves for our sub-region and continent. It should be a source of pride that it is Cameroon - known as 'Africa in miniature' - which takes the lead in this initiative, with the hope that others across the continent will follow.