Food and nutrition security and sustainable agriculture (FNSSA) are among the critical development concerns in Africa. FNSSA is among the policy priorities in many African countries and at the center of the AU/EU international development agenda. FNSSA was the priority R&I area in the AU-EU High Level Policy Dialogue on Science, Technology, and Innovation. This was further substantiated by the establishment of the Pan-African Network for Economic Analysis of Policies (PANAP). StEPPFoS thus, aims contribute to the FNSSA 10-year roadmap and the global transition towards sustainable food systems through the implementation of activities that link PANAP to the FNSSA partnership. Specific objectives are (1) to improved capacities of stakeholders (2) to enhanced science-policy interface (3) to improve strategies that promote scientific support within policy development (4) to expand and strengthen the PANAP Network. StEPPFoS will be implemented through its 8 work-packages (WPs) over a period of 48 months. Capacity building, stakeholder engagements, participatory monitoring, evaluation, and learning are the main methods to be used to deliver StEPPFoS objectives whiles adhering to open science principles and effective data management practices. The consortium is well positioned to deliver these objectives as it draws on the expertise and experiences of its partners drawn from both Europe and Africa credible academic, research, and policy institutions.

This project will analyze the modes of development of multinational companies or in the process of internationalization of African or Arab origin in the South. The project questions 1 / their relations of cooperation and competition, 2 / the circulation of knowledge on the conduct of business at the intersection of local cultures and globalization, 3 / professional business leaders (local elites formed in the North and expatriates) and 4 / doing business in highly regulated environments where the rules of law and formal legal institutions are more or less ineffective. Globalization is not a convergent model of management. Local ways of achieving the underlying business to transnational corporate control standards remain largely under-analyzed. This project will analyze the hybridization process in these large African companies where a new generation is changing business practices. The investigation will focus on companies located in four countries of the South (Morocco, Ivory Coast, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates and mobilize financial and statistical data, analysis of economic news, case studies of two companies located in the five different countries, semi-structured interviews with executives, managers and business schools professors and the exploitation of local researchers' surveys.

The project ?Knowledge and climate services from an African observation and Data research Infrastructure? aims to provide concepts for developing the best available science and science-based services in Africa that are needed to sharpen our common action on climate change as outlined in the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular SDG 13 ?Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts?. The concepts we want to provide aim at improving the knowledge base on climate change in Africa and developing the tools to combat the negative consequences of it. This basic objective shall be achieved by a consortium that combines partners from Africa and Europe but also combines diverse experiences, backgrounds and viewpoints. The common goal is to provide a comprehensive concept that supports the important societal role of research outlined above by co-designing research capacities for climate change observation with societal demands and expectations, in our case called ?climate services? and to pave the way for their implementation. The specific objectives of the proposed project are: ? A comprehensive design for a pan-African climate observation system developed on the basis of climate services as guiding design principle. This shall be rooted in a comprehensive documentation of past and existing observing capability, contrasted with scientifically justified requirements to identify the gaps. ? A broad information network as basis for a successful and sustainable cooperation that connects infrastructure operators, scientists, data and knowledge users, a community of practice in climate services, agencies and funding bodies. This will be achieved by a dense networking and knowledge exchange approach connecting to all important players on the global, continental, national, and local level. ? A solid strategy for implementation and usage in close connection to future actors and users.

French-speaking partnership composed of 5 universities of West Africa (Ivory Coast and Togo), 5 universities in the member states of the EU (France, Romania and Belgium) and networks such as CIRUISEF, AUF, CDUS and CAMES. The PULSE project targets two objectives for the students: support the continuation of studies in Master’s degree at the international level, and encourage professional integration for license graduates. It will involve innovative hands-on teaching supported by shared digital resources and strong links with businesses. This will be carried out through two types of actions:-The implementation of practical exercises (TP) with digital support in the African universities. The selected experiments will illustrate the laws of physics, chemistry and biology, and will use new digital tools for the phases of preparation, revision and edition of reports. In the first year of licenses, these TP of numerical simulations will replace the real TPs, and in the 2nd and 3rd years, they will provide support for the realization of the experiments. Digital tools will help rationalize the time of the students and teachers, and optimize the use of equipment and rooms. The real TPs will be implemented with easy maintenance equipment. The teachers will be trained and will ensure the durability of these practical exercises. -The creation of digital resource platforms that will be modular and mutualisable. In addition to academic disciplinary modules, transversal professionalization modules will be developed in collaboration with local businesses. A template module will include courses, assessment activities and multimedia resources. A digital manual (toolkit) based on the project results will be developed and disseminated on the international scale, to help universities to duplicate the resources and use them on their own curricula.

Nitrogen, N, represents 78% of the air we breathe, under the stable and inert form of N2, and once N2 is converted into reactive forms (Nr), it becomes a key nutrient that strongly influences ecosystem functioning and food production. The quantification of N budgets (N inputs and outputs) between the surface and the atmosphere is a prerequisite to understand the N biogeochemical cycle. In Africa, the increase in demography and the associated increased fertilizer inputs (to supply growing food and energy demands) will lead to increased emissions from amended soils, which will increase atmospheric N deposition and induce feedbacks to the ecosystems and the atmosphere. In Sub Saharan Africa, Low N contents in soils make natural ecosystems very vulnerable to the potential increase of N deposition induced by large scale anthropogenic activity development. Indeed, N in excess may lead to changes in biodiversity. But West African research institutes lack resources and ecosystems have not been as well monitored as in temperate regions. In this context, the overall objective of NitroAfrica is to study –coupling field experiments and different modelling approaches– the relationships and retroactions between atmospheric N deposition, N cycling in the soil-vegetation system, emissions of reactive N forms by the surface to the atmosphere, atmospheric chemistry and regional climate. NitroAfrica will focus on wet N deposition, because in Africa it is expected that N deposition on ecosystems, particularly in wet form, will increase by 50% by 2100. We will test two main hypotheses: (1) an increase in wet N deposition, as already observed in some regions of SSA and predicted in the future for many regions of SSA will significantly affect the ecosystem functioning (including agro-ecosystems), in terms of N processes in the soil (nitrification, denitrification, mineralization), and subsequent N compound emissions; and (2) these changes in emissions of N chemical compounds to the atmosphere will significantly impact regional atmospheric chemistry and regional climate over West Africa, ultimately influencing further N. The project is highly original because there is for now no such study for Africa addressing these feedbacks in a comprehensive way, linking N deposition, ecosystem processes, surface atmosphere N compound exchanges, atmospheric chemistry and climate, allowing to link alterations of local ecosystem processes to modifications of atmospheric chemistry at the regional scale. A French-Senegalese-Ivorian multidisciplinary consortium will bring expertise on atmospheric physical chemistry, microbiology, biogeochemistry and ecology in the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. The project is based on a close interconnection between experimental and modeling tasks, at the local and regional scales. Experiments will take place in 3 representative West African biogeographic zones (savanna and cropland sites located in Sudanian, Guinean and Sahelian zones). Local scale modelling will be performed to capture relevant soil-vegetation N-C processes leading to emissions, and surface atmosphere nitrogen fluxes will be upscaled to study the impacts at the regional climatic scale. The impacts of NitroAfrica will be measurable in terms of academic research, communication to different publics (large public, stakeholders, policy makers), training and education, and capacity building.