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In late 2020, the International Monetary Fund launched a Youth Fellowship Contest to give aspiring young leaders a chance to share their views on COVID-19 responses and global efforts to build back better – towards a greener, fairer and more inclusive recovery. Out of around 700 submissions from aro...

Thinking ahead to International Women’s Day on Monday I recalled two pivotal resolutions the United Nations General Assembly had adopted within a week of each other in 1972, one (27/2951) on December 11 establishing the United Nations University and the other (27/3010), on December 18, proclaiming 1...

A post by Diana Owuor, a student on our MSc. in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP). … In the ‘New Thinking for a New World’ podcast series by the Tällberg Foundation, Alan Stoga rightly states that one characteristic of the global response to COVID-19 is that it has not been global. A f...

He is a free spirit. “As a child I was always wandering around outside, building huts, counting stars.” He is self-deprecating: “I was interviewed for my PhD by a committee of old white men, a bit like myself now,” but also self-aware: “I consciously moved away from fundamental mathematics after my ...

In the 1970s, international organisations began to implement short-term diaspora return programmes to formalise and promote diaspora knowledge transfer for development. The first of these programmes was the Transfer of Knowledge through Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN), established by the United Nation...

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy, with world output contracting at 3.5% in 2020, and no recovery likely before the fourth quarter of 2021. Similar to other developing regions, sub-Saharan Africa recorded a 2.6% decline, following strong growth of 3.2% in 2019. Unfortunat...

Big data is on the rise and governments have fallen behind in setting global standards on its collection, storage and usage. Instead, governments are playing catch-up with harnessing the technology that controls data. This was the backdrop to a Chatham House webinar held on 15 February 2021, where s...

Women researchers have been at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, with female scientists across the globe playing pivotal roles, from advancing knowledge on the virus, to developing vaccines, treating patients and assessing the pandemic’s devastating economic and social impact. However, th...

Affiliated researcher and PhD alumnus Dr Carlos Cadena Gaitán has been named one of the ‘21 Heroes of 2021’ by the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, a global forum co-sponsored by UN-Habitat. Early in the pandemic, while working as Transport Secretary of Medellín in Colombia, Carlos took a l...

This year’s International Education Day, 24 January, occurs in the wake of a global pandemic that closed schools and universities worldwide, affecting 1.6 billion students in almost 200 countries — including some 120 Master’s students at UNU-MERIT in the Netherlands. Against this d...

Inspired by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, this series is the product of an international team from UNU-MERIT that first came together in the summer of 2020. It aims to provide a substantial and accessible platform in the fight against racism, articulated by young African thought-leaders who put...

Desertification may still seem like a far-off scenario for Dutch farmers, but it is a growing problem worldwide. The use of pesticides in agriculture, as well as the focus on monoculture, is depleting farmland to the point that it becomes lifeless land and ultimately desert. UM students Vincent and ...

The Sustainable Development Goals Report (2020) notes that we are far from being an open-defecation free world. Since 2015, around 500 million low-cost toilets have been diffused, but still about 2 billion people do not have access to a functioning toilet and about 4.2 billion people are using toile...

Why are boys and teenagers most prone to dropping out of school in Jordan? Why are Syrian children up to 10 times more likely to drop out than Jordanian children? And why is the return on education so uneven for different groups? In December 2020, Prof Franziska Gassmann took part in the launch even...

“The results for 2019 reinforce UNU-MERIT’s reputation in academic and policy circles as a leading institute undertaking societally and policy relevant research — particularly in the economics of innovation and technological change, including the governance of science and technology and on factors l...

A paper entitled ‘What factors drive successful industrialization? Evidence and implications for developing countries‘, co-authored by UNU-MERIT’s Dr Bruno Martorano, has won the 2019 Best Paper Award from the academic journal ‘Structural Change and Economic Dynamics’. The Journal’...

As many as 2 billion people worldwide do not have access to functioning toilets, and more than 4 billion use toilets that may be contaminating water sources, according to the latest Sustainable Development Goals Report (2020). This matters because sanitation feeds into almost every other SDG through...

We have received the shocking and tragic news of the sudden passing away of our Master’s alumnus Simon Neuland at the age of 30, last Friday. Simon was part of the 2013-14 cohort on our Master of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP), in the Social Protection Specialisation. We ...

On 17 March 2020, the Mayor of Amsterdam announced new measures to contain the coronavirus, including the closure of schools, restaurants, and cultural venues. In July 2020, researchers from the Migration, Transformation and Sustainability (MISTY) project sent an online survey to members of the Amst...

A post by Riesa van Doorn, a student on our MSc. in Public Policy and Human Development … Today, on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, let’s remind ourselves that violence against girls and women persists in every country in the world. According to the World H...