UNU-MERIT affiliated researcher nominated for thesis-based educational game In 2016, Irina Burlacu de Paoli (UNU-MERIT PhD alumna and external lecturer at Maastricht University’s Summer Programme in European Studies) created the Mobility Era Game, a research-based financial literacy board game. In the same year, she also founded Researchista, a platform that helps package research findings into creative, tangible learning tools. The Mobility Era Game is currently the number-one educ...

For every Master’s Open Day, we welcome prospective students and give them a general overview of the programme and its seven specialisations. We also invite our alumni to share their views on how the programme prepared them for their careers in international development, among others. On our latest Open Day in March 2020, we caught up with two alumni who reflected on the programme and their careers to-date. Welcome back and thank you for taking the time to visit us! Let’s first have a brief roun...

A new decade begins with the promise of a global rebrand, a new website, and a new director for UNU-MERIT. All three are currently being decided, so now is a good time to look back on 2019 – a year that featured two major developments in our outreach activities. First, European membership of The Conversation UK, which calls itself “an independent source of news and views, sourced from the academic and research community and delivered direct to the public”. Second, a non-profit account with Short...

Earth, air, fire and water – not Afropop from the 1970s but essential elements from the ancient Greeks – which in our modern “comms ecosystem” roughly equate to website, press, events and media. Bear with me a moment and let me explain! Our website is the core, press gives oxygen, events are the crucible, and media (whether audio, video or social) are channels to the outside world. Here’s how they fit together at UNU-MERIT – and how a new “fifth element” ramps everything up to another level. Ear...

Diversity, visibility and impact are three of the biggest buzzwords of the media landscape, especially for the UN family. They feed into various questions, including: Who is shown and who is seen? Who should set the spotlight? What is shared and what is gained? So on and so forth. This post aims to explode a few myths by drilling down the data while explaining our basic approach. … Here at UNU-MERIT we have two big advantages for communications. First, as a UN institute, diversity is in our DNA,...

A few years ago a Turkish PhD fellow said to me rather wistfully: ‘I would like to have your job. It seems very nice.’ At the time I was inclined to agree with him, though I knew this was tempting fate. The question is, what did he really know of my job beyond what he’d seen on the website or at a workshop? What does a UN Head of Communications, responsible for the image and output of more than 100 international researchers (most of whom have English as a second language) do all day? The very si...

In our third and final report from the DEIP Innovation Workshop in Morocco, September 2018, we spoke with Omar Elyoussoufi Attou, Head of Innovation at the Moroccan Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Executive Training. … How can this DEIP workshop help national governments — not only in Morocco but across the African Union? This workshop was an opportunity for us to have a better understanding of the issue of innovation in our countries, across various regions of ...

In this second report from our DEIP Innovation Workshop in Morocco, September 2018, we caught up with Dr. Mafini Dosso, an Ivorian national who works for the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Seville, Spain. … We spoke about the pyramid of science communications: about serving the handful of policymakers at the top and the mass of citizens at the bottom. But you also mentioned the disconnect between the two, i.e. the lack of quality science communications in the middle. ...

‘Leave no one behind’ is one of the boldest commitments in the UN’s 2030 Agenda. But what exactly does this mean? UNU-MERIT’s Prof. Shyama Ramani and Dr. Maty Konte joined the Global Festival of Action for Sustainable Development in Bonn, March 2018, to explain our work and efforts in this regard. In so doing they stressed the importance of research, outreach, and evidence-based policymaking to ensure that truly no one is left behind....

Taking a stand for evidence-based approaches, we delivered a course on Science Reporting at the City of Knowledge in Panama, 12-16 December 2016. The workshop title, ‘Reach & Turn’, referred to reaching out, turning heads, and shifting mindsets – in many ways the core of communications....