Ahead of World Day Against Child Labour, a new policy brief by Prof. Franziska Gassman and Eszter Timar weighs up the costs of child poverty in the Balkans. The brief covers deprivation in terms of education, health, and social mobility, before laying out the potential of social protection in building resilence and fostering development. Set against recent case studies from around the world, including Cambodia and Uganda, the brief gives policy recommendations on various critical issues includin...
Governments worldwide have pledged to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. But given the scale of the task, not even national governments can manage alone. This has sparked a new phenomenon: whereby non-governmental players – from start-ups to social enterprises to multinationals – are aligning strategies and working toward the same sustainable ends. This new reality is also an opportunity to study how these supposedly ‘selfish’ players can be corralled for the common good. ...
There’s no disputing that many African countries’ education systems are in trouble. Despite significant investment and some improvements linked to the push to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, children in large parts of Africa are simply not being well taught or learning what is needed as they progress through the school system....
On 22 January 2018, UNU launched its Sustainable Development Explorer, a new campaign highlighting UNU’s work to support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, the SDGs unite global action to overcome the world’s biggest challenges, from hunger and poverty to equality and peace. UNU’s work is uniquely comprehensive, spanning the full breadth of the SDGs. Some 400 UNU researchers worldwide are engaged in more than 180 research projects, generating...
For this edition of Alumni Watch, we caught up with Dr. Andres Mideros Mora of Ecuador, who graduated from our PhD programme in December 2017. He defended his thesis, ‘Essays on the Economic Effects of Non-contributory Social Protection’, while taking a short break from his role as Minister of Planning and Development of Ecuador....
Today, Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS, reminds us that one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. But this isn’t just a target; it is part of the fundamental human right to health because “… no one person has a greater right to health care than anyone else…” Today, on World AIDS Day, what exactly does this mean for developing countries? If you are the head of a developing country’s ministry of health (MoH), what would your opt...
On Thursday 23 November, you will defend your PhD dissertation “Prioritizing the HIV Response: A multi-criteria decision analysis”. Can you briefly describe what your study is about? / Nearly 35 years since the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, the political and financial momentum that saw rapid progress in increasing treatment coverage and reductions of new infections is showing signs of slowing down. The reduction in donor funding for HIV response in transition economies like Viet Nam, ...
You’ve worked on your PhD for the last five years, alongside a full-time job at the United Nations. What were your aims? Why did you choose to do that? / My aim was to develop a deeper understanding of the issues I was dealing with at the UN. For example, promoting the catch-up and long-term development of developing countries, particularly countries in ‘special situations’ such as least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, and small island developing states. Innovation and tech...
Why and how do some female child carers in Lesotho manage to stay in school despite being responsible for running a household? This was the question that researcher Brenda Yamba, originally from Zambia, wanted to answer. She defended her PhD at Maastricht University last June. “Brenda was what you might call a model student”, her supervisor Melissa Siegel says immediately. “In addition to being disciplined and eager to learn, she also dealt extremely well with feedback. She was hugely motivated ...
Today is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, and in homage to his philosophy and strategy of non-violence, the UN has marked it as the International Day of Non-Violence. In India, the countdown has also begun for 2 October 2019, the target date set to attain the Swachh Bharat or Clean India Mission (SBM). The SBM has the noble intention of making India ‘open defecation free’ (ODF) and millions of low-cost toilets are being built across the country towards this aim. But, to achieve the ODF mis...