News

Uganda’s refugee policy is praised worldwide as it is different from other hosting countries: refugees can stay in settlements or they can decide to move to a city. In both cases, they can seek employment anywhere. Yet, only in the first scenario do they receive humanitarian assistance and a piece o...

Every year in mid-June, students on our Master of Science in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP) are finally ready to immerse themselves in their Master’s thesis. Digging into the materials, it quickly becomes clear: a good Master’s thesis starts with a good literature review. But what e...

Policies that cut school expenditures under the premise of “doing more with less” can also contribute to a decrease in high school graduation rates that could easily cancel out those savings. Shutterstock A joint post by Profs. Louis Volante, Jo Ritzen et al. Recently, the Ontario government propose...

Ride the butterfly, fight the good fight, square the circle – these were just a few of the metaphors at play at the latest SDG Global Festival of Action. UNU-MERIT’s SITE4Society team joined the conference on 3 May 2019, in partnership with our sister institute UNU-FLORES. Put simply, our event aime...

A new report for the World Food Programme (WFP), co-authored by Prof. Franziska Gassmann and Eszter Timar, presents the findings of three country case studies – Armenia, the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan – and provides a general overview of social protection and safety nets issues in relation to fo...

Since 2000 when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a global academic benchmark for measuring student outcomes by testing 15-year-olds, many global education systems have been impacted by what sometimes looks and feels like a race to rank high. When the OECD la...

Charlotte Mueller’s PhD research focuses mainly on the African nations of Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Somalia — and she has travelled to all these countries over the last three years to collect data. Yet, as a European researching African issues, she is acutely aware of various Eurocentri...

The United Nations University in the Netherlands (UNU-MERIT) is pleased to announce an agreement with the World Food Programme to provide long-term monitoring, evaluation, analysis and policy guidance in support of WFP’s work with refugee and vulnerable communities in Kenya. Worth USD $2 million ove...

Peacebuilding is an arduous challenge — one that demands creative and comprehensive solutions. ‘Solutions’ that are all too often built on sand. ‘Solutions’ that are only really sustainable when built inclusively, from the ground up, with various actors. In April 2019, ...

In increasingly diverse societies, teaching must recognise the importance of affirming students’ cultural backgrounds in all aspects of learning. Shutterstock A joint post by Prof Louis Volante, Dr  Christopher DeLuca, and Prof  Don A. Klinger Classrooms in many parts of the world are increasingly d...

My session with the MPP students focused on IOM and the data work that we do at the Global Migration Data Analysis Centre in Berlin, including on migration governance indicators. We also had the opportunity to discuss how their degree could help them find internships and jobs at IOM and other intern...

Our researchers regularly meet and interact with policymakers, not only in New York and Geneva at UN level but also in Brussels for EU events. In March 2019, Maria Tomai joined an event on the Circular Economy, where she was able to brief EU policymakers on the work done at UNU-MERIT, particularly t...

In a remote corner of northwest Kenya, 800km from the capital Nairobi, lies a sprawling urban settlement built from tin sheet and tarpaulin provided by various UN agencies. Kakuma, the name shared by a town and one of the largest refugee settlements in Africa, is a remote place in a geographic, mora...

Teaching research methodology to our new PhD fellows is my favourite class. Doing so in small groups, as is often the case in our PhD programmes and professional training, allows me to engage in creative and innovative educational formats. It’s also much appreciated when teaching mid-career pr...

The ‘Strategic Innovation’ pilot programme, which aims to help entrepreneurs make strategic choices and prioritise them — so that they can really start innovating — kicks off this month in Maastricht and surrounding areas. An initiative of the Maastricht-based institute UNU-MERIT, Strate...

This Friday, pupils in countless cities across the world will skip school and march for climate action. In just a few months, the movement has made quite an impact. It now needs policy backup – and action. In a recent tweet, the 16-year-old Swedish youth leader Greta Thunberg gave a list of practica...

Throughout this series we have highlighted the importance of social protection for forced migrants, despite the political and economic effects surrounding its provision. In so doing, we have now built a guidance framework on how to adapt humanitarian relief into social protection, as part of a long-...

My co-author Francesco Loiacono and I won an exploratory grant from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) last year, and a small grant from the International Growth Centre (IGC) this year. The first allowed us to travel to Uganda and organise focus group discussions with refugees, firms and other sta...

As the world’s largest online and user-generated encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is an education medium used by students across the word. However, as with textbooks and educational materials in any society, Wikipedia suffers from great divisions and has the potential to shape our view of the world. For eve...

One of the most pressing and cross-cutting issues on the international agenda today is global migration – an issue only made more challenging by climate change and armed conflict. Against this backdrop, UNU-MERIT joined a global event designed to train future policymakers how best to tackle the chal...