The pioneering concept of African Union Law (provisionally defined for the purpose of this project as the bodies of treaties, resolutions and decisions that have direct and indirect application to the member States of the African Union) is currently underexplored and underdeveloped. However, it has the potential to be ground-breaking with far reaching implications. This Network initiative will explore the emergence of AU law as a new legal order and its implications for existing legal orders in the region. The proposed Network is multidisciplinary, with insights from different disciplines including legal, historical, social, political, economic, sociological and anthropological dimensions. It is thus a core arts and humanities research area that is relevant to the people of African descent but also has significant practical implications for the continent going forward. The concept has important and potentially radical implications for the African continent, its constituent member States and its people in Africa and in the diaspora. It is indisputable that there are specific problems that are peculiar to the African continent. These intractable problems are wide ranging and they include absence and/ or abuse of rule of law, human rights violations, child labour, modern slavery, corruption, racial and gender discrimination and environmental degradation. The idea of the African Union and its institutions as a standard generating institution, similar to the EU (but with its own unique features) is not only novel, but a necessary discourse in the search for collective solutions to these wide ranging problems and issues across the continent. This network will leverage on the availability of academics and researchers of African descent and on Africa in the UK in order to enrich the debate. It will bring together leading experts in areas related to AU Law from policy, practice and academic backgrounds. The practice-relevant, evidence-led focus will enable the Network participants to develop capacity building impacts. By offering new contributions on AU Law, this Network will provide a platform for existing researchers and also for the next cohort of researchers in this rapidly developing field. It is envisaged that the Network will also lead to the development of new curricula on AU Law in the UK and across Africa thereby creating a new pool of students, researchers and expertise. The Network shall also facilitate the establishment of an enduring relationship with key institutions in Africa.

The index case in Nigeria was announced on 27 February 2020 in Lagos. As at April 27 2020, the pandemic has reached over 32 of 36 states in the country, with 1,337 confirmed cases, 40 deaths, 225 recovered cases and allegations of vast under-reporting from various interest groups. Lagos is still the epicenter of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Nigeria with 54% of confirmed cases. While the mortality is low to compared to other countries, the potential for community spread and the recognition of the difficulty in managing it is now acute. In the campaign to keep safe against the spread of the pandemic, the major interventions are practicing regular hand washing, social distancing and keeping safe at home as well as self-isolation (implied to be done at home). Our research is motivated by concern about the capacity of residents of multi-tenanted houses to adhere to these instructions in an environment of lack of basic amenities and overcrowding, especially as there has been remarkable silence on coping strategies for these people in both state and federal government as well from the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) directives on COVID-19 protection. The purpose of this research is thus to provide support for the prevention of community spread of COVID-19 amongst residents of multi-tenanted housing in Lagos, Nigeria. The research support is anchored on the adoption of history, literature and music in understanding the coping mechanisms, promoting adherence to public health measures and advocating for community prevention strategies for people who live in multi-tenanted housing. The research is particularly focused on residents of multi-tenanted houses in Lagos, because their overcrowded living conditions make them particularly vulnerable to community spread of the Pandemic. The study adopts remote working methods (telephone interviews, radio call-in programs, social media and engagement) with archival research on history and literature engagement to ascertain the coping mechanisms that has worked in the past and will work now in the prevention of pandemic spread in poorer communities. The study will provide strategies on how to maintain social distance even in limited spaces and educate residents on the best ways to practicably share common and scarce facilities while maintaining healthy habits by providing tangible results that are of practical use to them. It will produce contextual studies about how residents of multi-tenanted housing cope with and respond to institutional health advocacy Improved knowledge on how local strategies differ from those adopted/recommended by the global movement. With these, the research will also be providing evidence of the role of arts activities in improving the lives of the poor and vulnerable residents of low-income localities. Envisaged research outcomes include advocacy jingles and spoken words to be aired in local language languages using very popular and local media such as radio, short animations to be shared widely on social media, and colourful posters to be disseminated in streets. In addition, policy briefs would be shared with government agencies, academic papers will be submitted to peer-reviewed International Journals. Other outcomes include on-line conference meetings. The research therefore brings researchers from History, Creative Arts, Literature and Housing, Pro-poor development with community leaders, media practitioners and government to ensure proactive actions are taken to further contain the spread of the pandemic in Lagos, Nigeria's pandemic epicenter. As there are comparable conditions of dense, sub-standard housing in most developing world cities now facing the pandemic, the research will also be capable of being replicated in other African cities facing similar challenges.

Still and moving images have historically played a key part in the articulation (visually and textually) of political ideas and have constructed positionings and discourses on the politics of elections. ArtoP sets out to capture these articulations through the images produced by Nigerian artists (and respective creative industries) at a critical time around the Nigerian presidential elections in February 2019. As a multi-sited research project, ArtoP will identify the creators of artistic content that engage with political discourse across regions in Nigeria. It will focus upon the types of images that are being created with a view to collect and curate and analyse evidence of this for an archive. In particular it focuses upon how artists operate within and outside of official networks in Nigeria and within contested spaces on social media around the elections in 2019. Through collaboration with our partners at University of Lagos and Bayero University, and links stemming from previous research (Callus, 2017, Gore, 2001) to established hubs and local networks of Nigerian art worlds including those in digital spaces, ArtoP will analyse 1) the ways regimes of political discourse are dispersed and/or resisted both materially and virtually in the arts; 2) the official and unofficial modes and assemblages of dissemination and consumption which make and seek to reshape the publics addressed by these art producers, political patrons and subversive commentators. The aestheticization of political agendas has longstanding trajectories in West Africa (Gore, 2001) but has been deployed in innovative modes within the technologies of digital media that are able to make and address new publics. Previous research that focused upon animation from Africa, has found examples of animation being distributed in official and unofficial (real and virtual) networks to disseminate political voices (Limb, Callus, 2017) and the simultaneous making of tactical subversive animation (De Certeau, 1980). Animation offers a powerful tool for focusing on these articulations of politics and the wider creative industries within Nigeria due to it's hybrid modes of making and production. These have offered new creative possibilities and underpin the emergence of new (or renewed) formations of the creative industries within Nigeria which intertwine with its political structures that shape its trajectories and assemblages. During the last elections in Nigeria, political campaigning exploited these new technologies (The Guardian, 23/03/2018), with animation in its varieties of forms playing a role in creating and making accessible political content. The Nigerian presidential elections of 2019 provide a lens to investigate these inter-connectivities as they further augment in real and virtual spaces and consider how local social media realise its regimes of visuality. Consequently, ArtoP moves away from the conventional concepts of art practice and production for a gallery context, to recognising forms that circulate in digital spaces and are considered to belong to spaces of popular culture (animation, gifs, videos, posters, cartoons). By identifying these types of images, one can chart new assemblages, changes in artistic practices and their relationship to new technologies whilst identifying aspects that relate to traditions of artistic practice across the range of Nigerian arts. ArtoP's themes: Technologies, Materials and Art Practice; Visual Articulations of Politics; Assemblages and Networked Spaces, are representative of the convergence that occurs at this critical point in time and embedded across different events and project deliverables. An online archive, StoryMaps and a Creative Documentary are intended to broadly serve to inform general public, academics and stakeholders in globalised creative industries of these practices. Through the symposia and conference at SOAS, ArtoP will investigate these articulations in an academic context.

Where: SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), U (university), CoE (Centre of Excellence), CSES(Complex Social-Ecological System) & landscape/catchment/watershed: synonymous. The "Water for African SDGs" project will establish & develop the ARUA Water CoE as an effective, high-performance, hub & network of 8 African Universities' researchers & post graduate students. CoE research development will be based on understanding humans living on earth as the intricate coupling of society with the natural world - CSESs. We will forefront community engagement & knowledge sharing for sustainability. We will use research to catalyse change towards social and ecological justice and sustainability, paying attention to African community water and sanitation needs. The Water CoE has developed a systemic image of the SDGs as a planning, practice & evaluation tool. The image has SDG 6, Clean water & sanitation, at the centre, linking two primary water cycles: i) Water in a Catchment (rainfall, run-off, ground water recharge, evapo-transpiration, evaporation); & ii) Water Services - supply & sanitation (raw water from the natural resource, often in dams, pipes & pumps to water treatment works, treated potable water to households, waste water to treatment works & discharge into the natural resource). Several nodes place their water research in a climate change context (SDG 13), and acknowledge that water is integral to SDG 15 (life on land), 11 (sustainable cities & communities), & 12 (responsible consumption & production), Effective water resource management, supply and sanitation requires good water governance by strong institutions (SDG 16). The Water CoE itself embodies SDGs 17 (partnerships to reach goals), 4 (quality education) & 5 (gender equality). Each CoE node has strengths in different parts of these cycles. This project brings together strengths, so nodes can flexibly link & respond innovatively to research funding calls, & effectively apply research. Capacity-building, exchanges and mentorship will mainly be addressed through the development & delivery of a 3-day course by each node, to 14 participants from 3-5 other nodes. Participants will be doctoral students, early-, mid-career & established researchers. Nodes will host a course on their primary strength, nodes will co-develop courses out of secondary strengths. In Year 1, the hub (Rhodes U), will deliver a core foundation course to 3 delegates from each node (total 21), on Adaptive Integrated Water Resources Management (A-IWRM), including the CSES concept, transdisciplinarity and water governance. Node courses will run over Years 1 & 2, and an early identification of course areas is: Landscape restoration & catchment water use (Addis Ababa U, Ethiopia), hydrology, geohydrology & hydraulic regimes for IWRM (U Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), optimising benefit from dams (Cheikh Anta Dio U, Senegal), biodiversity, natural resource management, water-energy-food nexus (U Rwanda), urban water pollution (U Lagos, Nigeria), urban water quality design (U Cape Town, South Africa), & water in future cities (Makarere U, Uganda). Course days will include time to work on research proposals. In Year 3, activities will focus on grant applications and a Water CoE delegation attending a relevant international conference to present the outcomes of the whole project. Over the 3-year period, each node will have one opportunity to invite/visit an international specialist, & by the end of year 3 at least 3 collaborative research projects will be running, each progressing an SDG challenge-area. Spin-off companies in water & sanitation could be emerging, and each node will have community-based water and/or sanitation impact successes. At least 24 early career researchers and 24 doctoral students will be mentored through the CoE. We will demonstrate the clear emergence of an African water research cohort, addressing water-related SDGs, with positive outcomes and impact.

Africa is a continent blessed with immense human potential, but it faces a lot of complex and stubborn developmental challenges. Home-grown solutions to these challenges are slow to emerge as there is a drastic shortage of researchers on the continent, which means that there are not enough academics to do the research required nor are there enough academics to train the next generation of young researchers who need to do this research in future. On top of these constraints, tackling problems dealing with development is a complex and nuanced issue which needs the input from a lot of different scientific disciplines, but getting different disciplines to work together effectively on a common goal is a problem in itself. The project sets out to tackle the shortage in research capacity in Africa by developing a set of training and research activities aimed at bringing young researchers on board, and by creating the opportunity for experienced researchers to also participate in research groups that span different scientific disciplines. The training of researchers will happen in two ways, (i) by a set of very targeted courses aimed at developing the skills required to plan and do good research, and to make the results useful to other groups of people who may want to use the results, and (ii) through setting up research groups around a particular problem, where the research groups will contain a mixture of young and experienced researchers, and researchers that look at the problem from different perspectives e.g. from engineering, agricultural or human and social perspectives. In this way, the development of young researchers will be accelerated so that more people are trained to take up and deal with the rigours of an academic career, while the opportunity for young researchers to learn from more experienced ones is invaluable to make sure that they receive good training. The project will further focus specifically on topics of how renewable and sustainable energy can be applied in different African settings in an way that ensures that benefits are shared equally, and that different groups and specifically women get the opportunity to benefit. In particular, methods will be sought to employ renewable energy to benefit African small farmers and the entire food chain from farmer to market. Small farms and the distribution of products from these farmers is extremely important in Africa, as these small farmers collectively produce up to 70% of the continent's food, and any improvement that they can gain through using renewable energy in their farming and households is likely to make an important impact on their lives. However, in order to develop solutions that are successful and useful to them, one needs to approach the question form many different angles, including the type of technology, where and how to incorporate it into the farming or food chain activities, who are the people who will benefit, how they will benefit and whether the solution can be improved to make sure that a larger number of people will benefit. A further specific topic area will be on how renewable energy can be applied in large informal settlements to address scarcity to energy, and how to ensure that particularly women are empowered through renewable energy solutions. Through taking a broad approach to renewable and sustainable energy issues in Africa, and combining dedicated training and research activities, the project hopes to make an important contribution to training the top class African researchers of tomorrow, and to broaden their knowledge on how to tackle some of the most pressing developmental concerns on the African continent by working together with researchers who may not be in the same field as themselves.