Like so many other researchers sitting at home, watching the news about COVID-19, I have been impressed at how virologists, epidemiologists and other medical experts have caught the ears of national policymakers, business leaders and the general public. Suddenly, scientific facts and evidence bask in the trust of public opinion and fake news is once again ‘fake’ in the real sense of the word: unreliable, not to be trusted by anyone. Something climate experts have been dreaming of for decades, no...
A joint post by Sam Jones, Eva-Maria Egger and Ricardo Santos, United Nations University – WIDER As the COVID-19 virus has spread across the globe, developing countries are starting to enact many of the same policies used in China, Europe and North America to contain the virus. But are these policies appropriate in low income contexts? To help think about this we propose a simple index of lockdown readiness which identifies the share of households that could feasibly shelter at home for a ...
There’s a saying in English: “Necessity is the mother of invention” – but this has always struck me as incomplete. Necessity is also the mother of innovation, i.e. a novelty that generates a profit or something of value for a community, as in a social innovation. What follows is the story of our drive for community engagement and nudge therapy, amid the coronavirus pandemic. Around early March 2020, I started getting the same questions from my international students in Maastricht and my NGO team...
COVID-19 has brought a tsunami of change and impacted every facet and sector of society, including the lives of children, parents and teachers. UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently said that the coronavirus pandemic is the biggest global challenge since the Second World War. When K-12 schools will reopen in Canada remains an open question, and hope is quickly fading that students will be able to finish the 2019-20 academic year with face-to-face instruction. Ontario’s schools, for exam...
What are these corona-days like for students in Maastricht? How is the coronavirus affecting their studies and other aspects of their lives? Maastricht University’s independent newspaper Observant is running a series of interviews with current students to find out how they are coping with the shift to online education. Two of our Master’s students in Public Policy and Human Development, Thierry Bleijswijk and Maren Slangen, shared their experience. Cleaning ambulances as a Red Cross...
A post by Mantej Pardesi, alumnus of our Master’s programme in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP). … The novel coronavirus has put an emergency brake on the express train of our global economy. This single-celled micro-organism has grounded fleets of jumbo jets, crashed stock markets, stopped production in industrial factories and suffocated the economy. In so doing it has uncovered alarming fault lines in the world of work. Many people in the knowledge economy are able to wor...
On 26 March 2020, an utterly divided EU emerged from the European Council dedicated to European measures aimed at managing the severest crisis since 1929, one far worse than the 2012-2017 crisis. The coronavirus pandemic and the transpiring economic and social crises present Europe with an extraordinary opportunity: to decide to move towards a deeper unity, or to decline irrevocably. The prevailing road will naturally depend on the decisions of the governments in the European Council and other ...
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic and precautionary measures have been elevated since then around the world, to contain the disease as much as possible. One important measure has been to close down all schools and universities and shifting to online education. For those of us working in the education sector, the shift to online teaching has been challenging, requiring us to revise our approaches to teaching and setting exams. New skills are...
A joint post by Claudia Abreu Lopes and Sanae Okamoto The new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has been spreading rapidly but at a different rate in different countries. A variety of emergency responses and policy strategies have been implemented with varying outcomes so far. The Asian countries and territories that were first hit by the outbreak have built on responses to previous epidemics such as SARS. Other countries are learning from this but also adopting their own strategies. It’s possible...
A few years back, I came across someone who was enrolled on the EPRM course, while I was looking for an expert in primary health care on LinkedIn. Exploring the programme content on the UNU-MERIT website, I noticed that this blended course aims to extend the research knowledge and analytical skills of working professionals through its five comprehensive modules. Overall, my goal is to directly work with the government personnel, policymakers and relevant stakeholders for policy change based on f...