This series tracks the working lives of our part-time PhD fellows. Many work at the highest of levels, both nationally and internationally, including for other parts of the UN system. They come to Maastricht for our unique PhD Dual Career Training Programme in Governance and Policy Analysis (GPAC²). The questions are posed each time by Dr. Mindel van de Laar.
Dual Focus
Science for the SDGs: Building the interface between research & policy
21 November 2017
You’ve worked on your PhD for the last five years, alongside a full-time job at the United Nations. What were your aims? Why did you choose to do that? / My aim was to develop a deeper understanding of the issues I was dealing with at the UN. For example, promoting the catch-up and lo...
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A positive view of the future prevents school dropouts in Southern Africa
16 November 2017
Why and how do some female child carers in Lesotho manage to stay in school despite being responsible for running a household? This was the question that researcher Brenda Yamba, originally from Zambia, wanted to answer. She defended her PhD at Maastricht University last June. “Brenda...
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Demystifying energy systems: From Brittany to the Black Sea
19 September 2017
The Joint Research Centre is quite a unique institution at international level: we produce scientific studies and reports that feed into the work of colleagues in other Directorates-General – who in turn are responsible for designing EU Regulations and Directives. We contribute to the...
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The coming storm: Helping rural communities cope in Southeast Asia
15 June 2017
Climate change is not only about the environment – it also has major financial and institutional implications. This was the backstory to a recent report on ‘Risk Financing for Rural Climate Resilience in the Greater Mekong Subregion’ co-authored by GPAC² fellow Ornsaran Pomme Manuamor...
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Dear World Economic Forum: Everyone needs quality education!
20 January 2017
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is taking place in Davos, Switzerland, and the issues being discussed include education, gender and work. A world away, the work of PhD Fellow Brenda Yamba considers child carers and high school attendance in Southern Africa — particularly how they...
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Colombian PhD fellow wins prestigious Dutch scholarship
11 January 2017
PhD fellow Gloria Bernal, from our GPAC2 cohort 2017, has won a scholarship from the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (NFP). One of only two beneficiaries from Maastricht University in the 2016 round, she currently works as a teacher at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, ...
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Keeping tabs on international achievement & educational governance
27 July 2016
The GPAC² PhD programme, designed for working professionals, brings us not only interesting PhD fellows but also increases our academic network thanks to external supervisors. One of our associated researchers, Prof. Louis Volante, initially came in as supervisor to Dr. Derek Copp, bu...
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PhD fellow wins best paper award at international conference
26 July 2016
Ana Cristina Calderon Ramirez, a PhD Fellow on our GPAC² programme, has beaten around 100 other researchers to win Best Paper Award at the International Public Procurement Conference 7 (IPPC7). The paper, ‘Elements of public procurement reform and their effect on the public sect...
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Weighing up the difficult world of child labour
30 June 2016
Around 168 million children worldwide are involved in child labour, according to recent ILO estimates. More than half of them, 85 million, are doing hazardous work. These numbers have fallen in recent years, but trends vary across regions, countries and sectors and the figures remain ...
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