A post by Cristina Mancigotti, Capacity Development Coordinator at UNU-MERIT’s Capacity Development Office  Students consider dropping out of courses for a number of reasons, but our research shows that peer discussions and local context examples during class sessions can increase engagement and completion rates in online courses.   Challenges for online students and educators During the course of an interview, we were not surprised to hear a student telling us that they considered droppin...

Article co-authored by Yannick Markhof, PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT [Reprinted by permission from VoxDev; Philip Wollburg and Alberto Zezza] Insights from high-frequency phone survey data collection reveal that access, rather than hesitancy, prevents vaccine uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa. COVID-19 vaccination rates in Sub-Saharan Africa remain low as a lack of easy access to vaccines keeps high vaccine acceptance from translating to widespread coverage. March 11, 2023, marked the three-year anniversa...

A joint post by PhD alumni Racky Balde and Elvis Avenyo. … The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated counter-measures continue to shed light on the social and economic challenges facing African countries. Economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa countries is expected to decline, putting pressure on already limited fiscal space and resources in the region. The worst affected will be people working in the informal economy, which in most African countries represents the biggest part of the econom...

Her Majesty Queen Mathilde of the Belgians paid an in-person visit to UN House in Brussels, the headquarters of several agencies, funds, and programmes of the United Nations in the Belgian capital, as well as a virtual visit to the UN in Liberia, on 23 September 2021. During her meeting with representatives from UN organisations in Brussels, Her Majesty discussed the main priorities of the UN, and in particular the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It was Her Majesty’s ...

After struggling for 39 years to develop a fertile ground for democratic governance, Nigeria had its turning point in May 1999 when it became the world’s fourth largest democracy. This came after 16 years of brutal military rule. Despite complaints of fraud by political opposition in each election held since 1999, local and international election observers have regarded each of Nigeria’s general elections as relatively free and fair. On the economic front, Nigeria is now the largest economy in A...

Knowledge 2 Knowledge Entrepreneurship, Côte d’Ivoire, is a one-year capacity-building training programme to help knowledge institutes in Côte d’Ivoire to foster an entrepreneurial mindset and skills in their students. The project hopes to achieve a lasting positive and tangible impact on job creation in a country and world region faced with high levels of youth unemployment. While Africa is the only region where the youth population will continue to grow, over one in five youth are not in emplo...

Bruno Martorano, United Nations University; Francesco Iacoella, United Nations University; Laura Metzger, Harvard Kennedy School, and Marco Sanfilippo, Università di Torino Chinese investment in Africa has helped spark economic growth and improve social outcomes across the continent. Yet Chinese projects often seem to go hand in hand with civil protests. We wanted to find out whether these were isolated incidents or signalled broader discontent among the population. In new research, we show that...

The World Bank launched its Development Impact blog on 1 April 2011, and has since published exactly 1500 posts. To celebrate turning 10, the editors of the blog decided to replace its meteor logo with something that better captures the aim of development research: i.e. to inform on the range of potential outcomes and choices in policy design and development processes. Responding to a call for artistic ideas, our Bolivian-Italian PhD fellow Mariajose Silva-Vargas sent in the image above, which w...

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. Unfortunately, this comes at a time when the region has been experiencing a surprising and very welcome manufacturing renaissance. Historically, industrialisation has been associated with rapid technological im...

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, the health crisis has laid bare disparities in the scientific system. Girls are significantly under-represented in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects at school, and women occ...