This grant will support the scoping and formation of a 'community asset and research partnership' to build a 'living roots bridge' that brings together and explores community and public health linkages within the North West London (NWL) Integrated Care System (ICS) to tackle health inequity. Ealing is a 'superdiverse' borough in West London with racially minoritised and migrant communities, longstanding histories of mobilising for racial justice, and rich cultural and community assets. These assets include local parks, allotments, youth centres, a vibrant music scene, art galleries, and food hubs, to name a few. Here, there are vast inequities in health between groups linked to intersecting social determinants of health, including ethnicity, wealth and income. Focusing on Ealing and through a 'syndemics' framework and participatory action research, we will (1) create shared understandings of the main problems related to health (in)equity and potential areas for change, (2) map and scope community assets and facilitate collaboration, and (3) explore collaborative models with a view to establishing one (or more) community asset and research hubs with linkages to the NWL ICS. A 'syndemics' approach enables us to view health problems as interconnected, specifically looking at the social context which drives multiple health problems in disadvantaged populations. This is more robust than 'single disease' approaches which often dominate public health thinking. We will use transdisciplinary, inclusive approaches which critically, seek to build trust amongst partners, and with the aim of facilitating long-term collaboration through a sustainable, engaged research consortium for systems change, health equity and wellbeing in Ealing. We envision that this project will benefit the wider Ealing community through 1) focusing on an 'assets' or strengths-based approach, which includes a better understanding of wellbeing, and 2) bringing together diverse, and also under-represented, voices to take action on health equity in the borough.

This project uses the arts as a way to facilitate communication between citizens and policy actors, on issues of environmentally sustainable development. The project will establish a network of people across Africa to trial this, learn about how it works in different places, and even achieve policy impact in relation to live environmental issues that concern them. It draws on two previously funded AHRC projects. In our previous projects, we found that various art forms, including song and music, photography, sculpture and plays, can be used to facilitate dialogue between citizens and policy actors. Often, policy actors communicate directives 'down' to citizens, citizens communicate concerns directly 'up' to policy actors, or citizens agitate through art to create public pressure on policy actors. Rarely, co-creation of understanding between these actors may take place. The project will create a network of people across five countries: Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Ghana and Kenya. We will bring together artists, citizen groups, researchers and policy actors from each country. These network members will organise national level workshops, each one based on a specific theme of concern to environmentally sustainable development. These include: changes to pastoral livelihoods in the contexts of climate change, the role of apiculture, flooding, desertification, and farming in the context of sea level rise. The theme running through these issues is development in the context of climate change. Artists will facilitate an artistic or cultural activity, such as production of a song or photographs, through which citizens and policy actors will share ideas and perspectives on these issues. They will work towards specific policy actions that need to happen. The exact format each workshop will take is decided at national level by the workshop participants before and during the workshop. It will be guided by the work we did in previous projects. We will share our national level artworks on a group digital space, and have an online dialogue session where all international participants learn about each other's experiences. This will help us all understand what worked in different places and how, and the different roles the arts can play in facilitating communication between citizens and policy. We will actively invite other groups to view our works, attend our online exhibition/ performances, and join our network by sharing their own experiences This is a truly novel activity, especially in our study contexts, and it has the potential to engender powerful changes. Academic research has begun to consider the role of the arts and humanities in building and understanding climate change scenarios, and the different meanings people ascribe to different environmental futures. But, these approaches are fairly new in the East and West African contexts, and have not been widely applied to other environmental issues or beyond scenario building. The work therefore has potential to make significant changes. It will also be challenging: our former work found that entrenched hierarchies and sectoral silos can prevent transdisciplinary change. This work will show whether these need to be challenged for the arts to make policy impact. The website hosting our outputs will remain live after the project lifetime. The network will continue to function through it, meaning that this work can go on to develop into other national or international projects, and have enduring impact.

Across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), many of the largest development projects currently underway are in remote rural areas. These include the £15 billion Lamu-South Sudan-Ethiopian Transport Corridor Project, which will connect a new port facility at Lamu on the Kenyan coast with northern Kenya, Ethiopia and South Sudan through rail and road links as well as an oil pipeline and related refinery capacity. In the interior of Sierra Leone, a UK-Chinese consortium has launched a multi-billion pound operation in the Tonkolili mining complex, one of the world's largest defined reserves of iron ore. These projects are part of a modern scramble for Africa's land and resources and entail unprecedented levels of new investment. They are often in marginal rural areas that were long neglected by states and have a legacy of conflict and violence. The vast majority living at the rural margins have been only minimally captured by market and state institutions and instead rely on informal relations and institutions to promote peace and regulate land and resource access. While it is widely assumed that big development will transform the lives and livelihoods of rural populations, there are many examples that large development investment can be deeply destabilising and actually lead to new violence while doing little to create new jobs, spur local entrepreneurship or promote peace. This project relates to the third theme of the call that is concerned with how to minimise the risk of violence and its impacts on the poor. It examines how and why local peacebuilding efforts succeed in minimising violence in contexts where there are large new investments, focusing on the remote rural areas of Kenya and Sierra Leone. Through rigorous fieldwork in different settings of local politics and governance in northern Kenya and northern Sierra Leone, it tests the assumption that efforts to reduce the threat of violence and its impacts on the poor are more likely to succeed where they support local institutions and relations to build and sustain peace. A combination of methods will be used including a survey of households in the study sites, semi-structured interviews as well as informal discussions and interactions to develop a nuanced understanding of the institutions and relations that communities use to solve their problems and negotiate for better outcomes. In both Kenya and Sierra Leone a senior scholar will work closely with an early career researcher through the life of the project to transfer skills in generating and analysing data as well as making knowledge accessible to non-academic stakeholders. In Kenya we will work closely with Dr. Roba Duba Sharamo, a senior academic affiliated with the Future Agricultures Consortium who previously headed the Institute for Security Studies in Addis Ababa. In Sierra Leone, the team will be led by Professor Paul Richards from Njala University. The teams will partner with Saferworld in Kenya and Conciliation Resources in Sierra Leone to develop plans to translate the research findings into usable resources for a variety of development stakeholders, including states, national and local civil society, foreign investors, and donor and aid agencies. These will be discussed at knowledge sharing events in Nairobi and Freetown with senior officials. Events in the UK will be organised with targeted stakeholders including British-based overseas private investors in Kenya and Sierra Leone, the British Overseas NGOs for Development association, EU and OECD representatives, the DFID Fragile States and Conflict Team, and the All Party Parliamentary Groups on Conflict Issues and on Africa.

BEST addresses the research issue that African drylands are fast approaching a tipping point of range enclosure, with associated loss of wild and domestic grazer mobility, and attendant loss of ecosystem services and of poor people's livelihoods. The shift to an enclosed (or conversely back to an open) state is driven by the interplay of changing policies on land tenure and natural resource management. The effects of these policies, which are integrated at the level of household tradeoff decisions and subsequent land use choices, are expressed in environmental and social sustainability implications. BEST asks the research question: How do different policy and economic drivers shape household decisions on land use choices, and with what ecosystem services and poverty implications? BEST's objectives are therefore: (1) to develop a conceptually innovative approach focusing on the intersection of changing land tenure and NRM policies and their impact on tipping drylands from open, resilient rangelands with mobile domestic and wild animals and often cash-poor but relatively secure and resilient pastoral livelihoods, into a closed, impoverished state (2) to leverage existing datasets (biophysical and socioeconomic), extract maximum analytical power and develop policy relevant lessons from cross-border comparative analyses of Kenya/ Ethiopia Boran and Kenya/Tanzania Maasai systems (3) to model household-level decisions on drylands resource use choices in different policy and economic contexts, integrating biophysical and socioeconomic dimensions, maintaining a disaggregated level of analysis across household types and conditions, and exploring policy and economic incentives fostering conservation-compatible choices (4) to develop policy scenario evaluations to support better ecosystem management, making more visible and comprehensible poor people's resource use choices, and enhancing their livelihoods (5) to build on local knowledge, engaging stakeholders at all levels, through networking, field consultation, workshops, and media outputs, from concept to beyond project end. BEST will also share knowledge and build capacity across the whole partnership and beyond, through collaborative working, stakeholder engagement and a wide range of outputs pitched at policy as well as scientific audiences - to build capacity across the collaboration and beyond, - to ensure maximum impact, leveraging dissemination through non-funded project partners, research and practitioner networks alongside the stakeholder engagement activities BEST research design, methods and materials use conceptually innovative modelling, alongside major extant datasets, and a cross-border comparative analysis encompassing three of the poorest African countries, to develop understanding of household decisions over land use. The BEST partnership combines in depth experience of the biophysical and socioecological dimensions of the ecosystems studied, advanced modelling capabilities, and outstanding experience in communications and engagement, with significant research, policymaker and practitioner networks. UK and non-UK members of the BEST partnership already manage major datasets necessary for the work. Together with non-funded partners ASARECA, STEPS and TAWIRI, and the involvement of BEST research partners with current research collaborations, the BEST partnership aims not only to deliver findings that will help evaluate policy scenarios, giving credible and relevant insight into the ecosystem services and poverty implications of different land tenure and NRM policies, but also to ensure those findings and tools are embedded into policymaking and practice.

Chronic high-skilled workforce shortages in Bangladesh’s Public Health Sector are a formidable constraint to the nation’s sustainable human development. Primarily stemming from their Public Health programmes, HEI are unable to meet the priority skill demands of the sector’s NGOs, government agencies and other stakeholders. The academic learning model coupled with weak faculty teaching capacities, cannot equip graduates for the real-world professional skillsets to constructively engage community Public Health needs.BRACSPH, ICCCAD-IUB and AUW identified systemic challenges to their Public Health Curricula in the interrelated areas of course structure and underskilled faculty without professional development systems. In encountering faculty-centered, didactic lecture, rote-learning classrooms, students graduate without the competencies to professionally succeed. The partners recognize the economic imperative for Higher Education transformation to develop successive generations of professionals to positively impact the public health sector. Partners will ultimately invigorate their respective mandates of educational excellence, while averting the impending quality crisis across the Higher Education sector.It is therefore mission-critical to devise a multi-faceted solution to achieve the desired education outcomes for our valued students and future workforce. This model will be systemically redesigned around student learners’ competency development by introducing the following four interdependent components:1. Public Health Competency-based Curriculum 2. Public Health Learning Methodologies3. Faculty Facilitator Development 4. Faculty Professional Skills TrainingIt is only when these core Competency-based Curriculum features are integratively designed as an educational ecosystem that we will more fully realize our students’ innate potential and contributions in the Public Health sector.