This article is part of UNU’s “17 Days, 17 Goals” series, featuring research and commentary in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit, 25-27 September 2015 in New York City. Goal #5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls Women and girls represent roughly half the global population, yet are disproportionately excluded in many decision-making processes. At the household level, many women and girls in less advanced countries face different cultural and religi...

This article is part of UNU’s “17 Days, 17 Goals” series, featuring research and commentary in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit, 25-27 September 2015 in New York City. Goal #1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere On 25th September, 15 years after the Millennium Summit, world leaders will reconvene to decide a new set of global development targets: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Their primary objective, or Goal 1, will be to ‘end poverty in all its forms...

The path to doctoral funding is littered with Google searches, open calls, and endless talks with friends, colleagues, and contacts. So what’s the key to finding and securing funding? PhD fellow Ayla Bonfiglio shares her own backstory, along with her (proven) tips for success. The doctoral candidate is at a stage in his or her academic career when early career scholarships are not yet applicable and larger-scale projects with core funding are inappropriate and likely to be unrealistic. Wha...

African countries are now recognising the value of social protection programmes in reducing extreme poverty. This two-week course aims to give an in-depth understanding of how to develop social transfer programmes. ‘Designing and Implementing Social Transfer Programmes’ A course for policymakers, government officials and practitioners 27 July – 7 August 2015 / Cape Town, South Africa The Economic Policy Research Institute (EPRI), the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and UNU-ME...

Providing jobs may increase stability and avoid future violence, especially in low and middle-income countries. But do employment programmes really have this impact? We will study this question for a set of post-conflict countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. A new project co-run by UNU-MERIT will improve our understanding of the links between aid, development and stability in Afghanistan, Yemen and a range of African nations. The project will be led by the Hague Institute for Glob...

After three decades of trial and error, innovation policy is taking off in Africa. Our new policy brief tracks the roll out of science, technology and innovation (ST&I) policies in 11 African nations, in the context of various development issues. Experts from around the world recently met in Nairobi, Kenya to analyse innovation policies in Botswana, Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Among other outputs, the workshop mapped ST&I p...

Science and technology helped Western nations achieve their current levels of development, but the same transforming effect is yet to happen in Africa. A key challenge for African countries is to work out how much to invest in science and then how to allocate these investments, says a new paper co-authored by PhD fellow Hugo Confraria. Africa’s share of global scientific output has clearly improved in the last decade, up from 1.6% in 2004 to 2.6% in 2013. On the one hand, this shows the continen...

Some Western policymakers see China as a threat to their work in Africa. But when taking a dynamic perspective, as in this working paper, Chinese and Western activities can be seen as complementary. In this way, an entirely different picture emerges. This paper discusses the entry of China into the game of foreign finance in Africa. It analyses the scope, destination and sectoral distribution of Chinese financial flows and trade in comparison with Western patterns and trends of aid, foreign dire...

We had five PhD defences in June 2014, covering government policies for highly skilled migrants, education and health in Senegal, housing in Uganda, government reform in Kosovo, and innovation in Latin America. See the events calendar and boxes below for more details. This page will be updated after each event....

It’s the “International Year of Family Farming” and time we realized that families are key to rural development in Africa. Smallholders manage 80 per cent of African farmland, often doing a lot more than tilling the land. Homes and markets are full of family entrepreneurs, working in everything from entertainment to hairdressing to repairs. So we think that 2014 should also highlight the work of non-farm businesses. In the 1960s and 70s these small businesses were low productive, survivalist act...