The AfriConEu project envisions to essentially strengthen and reinforce the digital innovation ecosystems in Africa by targeting existing Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) and supporting them through capacity building and networking activities. African DIHs are playing a central role in the development of digital entrepreneurship and by raising their capacities to tackle the challenges they face they will be more effective in driving digital innovation forward. To achieve its mission, the AfriConEu project will connect DIHs from Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania with DIHs from Europe with the aim to (i) facilitate knowledge and experience sharing, (ii) drive the development of mutually beneficial partnerships and (iii) support the creation of collective projects for boosting digital economy, empowering youth and fostering innovation and growth. To realize its mission the project will develop, test and validate the “AfriConEu Networking Academy” an innovative mechanism for connecting and sharing best practices, experiences and resources between DIHs in Africa and between DIHs in Africa and EU, in a comprehensive, replicable and self-sustaining way. Through two flagships programmes, the AfriConEu Networking Academy will empower and enable African DIHs to best serve their local industry, boost their start-up ecosystem and empower the youth population with the necessary skills to thrive in a digitalized world.

To understand and mitigate economic inequalities, both locally and globally, we need to acknowledge inequalities within households. Yet, in most empirical studies, such intra-household inequalities are disregarded mainly because we lack appropriate measurement tools and data. Not only is this problematic for inequality measurement, this lack of understanding hampers the design of cost-effective poverty reduction and child development policies. This project has five general objectives. First, I will update the facts about inequalities through direct measurement of intra-household consumption allocations, and relate these to spousal income contributions. Second, I will develop and validate novel measures of parental resource-allocation preferences and use these to study whether children are likely to benefit more if mothers, rather than fathers, receive cash transfers. Third, I will develop and validate novel measures of household decision-making and use these to investigate how targeted transfers shape women’s empowerment. Fourth, I will study whether cash transfers or an educational parenting program is most cost-efficient for child development. Fifth, I will use an integrated framework and the new tools and data, to refine our understanding of the mechanisms behind inequalities among adults and child development. Concretely, the project will contribute to our knowledge in the following specific ways. I will carry out an extensive data collection on intra-household allocations, parental-allocation preferences and women’s empowerment, in ten very diverse countries, one from each decile of the world income distribution. I will engage in a local RCT in Tanzania on cash transfers and parenting, which also involves extensive data collection on household consumption, time use, preferences and decision-making. Finally, I will conduct lab experiments in Chile, India and Tanzania so as to validate the parental-allocation preference and decision- making measures.

The fight against mosquito-borne diseases in sub-Saharan Africa is significantly hindered by the absence of comprehensive, long-term, and high-quality datasets. This limitation hinders our understanding of disease transmission dynamics, the effects of climate change, the consequences of anthropogenic factors such as deforestation and urbanization, and the impacts of vector control interventions. Although the WHO advocates for surveillance as a core intervention against vector-borne diseases, most low-income countries lack the financial and technical capacity to implement this on a large scale. Furthermore, there are no systematic efforts to collect such critical data in Africa, even as risks from climate and land use changes increase. We therefore propose to establish a networked observatory for systematic and long-term collection, analysis and dissemination of high-quality data on mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases in Africa, starting with five countries in the east & southern Africa region. The observatory will comprise geographically dispersed data collection nodes, reflecting spatial variations in climate, disease epidemiology, and socio-economic conditions, and will be owned and managed locally by African partners to enhance sustainability. To maximize value, the observatory will cover multiple mosquito-borne diseases, collecting standardized data on entomological metrics such as vector densities, species diversity, seasonal phenology, host preferences, transmitted pathogens, and genomic variations, alongside critical climatic, anthropogenic, and other environmental factors. We will build in-country capacity to perform all the entomological and genomic assays locally without having to ship samples abroad; including capacity to analyze, interpret and use the data. We will also gather summaries of health metrics from local facilities and collaborate with partners to include One Health indicators, aligning with global health security priorities.