A guest post by Giulia Mori, current student in our 2022-23 MPP cohort The Italian agricultural sector relies heavily on migrant workers, who accounted for almost 400,000 workers in 2020, corresponding to more than 30% of Italy’s agricultural labour force. Migrants working in the Italian fields (braccianti, or ‘a pair of arms’) are subjected to exploitation and abuse and are often trapped in the mafia-like system of caporalato, a phenomenon that involves the recruitment and exploitation of migra...
Our ‘Comprehensive Innovation for Sustainable Development’ (CI4SD) team led by Dr. Lili Wang has won €250,000 in ‘Merian’ funding from the Dutch Research Council and the Chinese Academy of Sciences for a vertical farming project entitled, ‘GREENFARM’. Her team will work with counterparts at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Institute of Genetics and Development Biology in China. Vertical farmin...
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...
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...