Dual Focus

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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 ...