The network for Partnerships for Resilience through Innovation and Integrated Management of Emergencies and Disasters (PRIMED) primarily aims to strengthen community preparedness and resilience as a strategic approach for addressing three key global challenges, i.e., sustainable development and poverty reduction, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change. Participation of communities in disaster management programmes is recognized as key for minimizing the severity of natural and climate related hazards on the most vulnerable and recovery from disaster, thus ensuring sustainable development for all. Efforts are shifting away from reactive emergency response frameworks to more proactive management approaches that incorporate varying socioeconomic and cultural interests, socially differentiated groups (such as those based on gender, age, physical challenges), capabilities and resources for effectively reducing vulnerability and sustainably increasing resilience at the local level. Many of these communities struggle with deploying and managing sustainable infrastructure, such as services for energy access via renewable or fossil fueled electrification programs, roads and transport services. Small and medium sized municipalities in these developing nations, especially, are often constrained in terms of financial and professional capacity. At the same time, public servants need to manage complex planning and policy processes to ensure that the communities they are serving will have appropriate systems in place to respond to climate shocks. This includes sufficient information to ensure that new human settlements, and associated energy and transport services settlements, will be built so as to be climate compatible, with reduced vulnerability to future events, whilst at the same time enabling sustainable development. The PRIMED network will, therefore, facilitate social innovation and knowledge co-creation, taking as a starting point, applications and models of resilience interventions and building sustainable infrastructure where success has been achieved through improved community partnerships, leadership training, participative research and action oriented education. Partnerships created within the PRIMED network will bring together international and national academics, researchers, policy and decision makers, practitioners, and community members that represent the various social groups, to share their varied perspectives, reflections and experiences of what works. These interactions will enable the team to: 1. Understand and define constraints and opportunities 2. Define mechanisms required for increasing the participation of diverse coastal social groups, including the marginalized, in disaster mitigation and preparedness 3. Identify effective educational tools that improve leadership skills of community members 4. Improve community capacity to take action and build their overall resilience to coastal hazards 5. Improve the management of complexities associated with climate resilient and low carbon development policy and planning.

The ARUA Centre of Excellence in Climate and Development (ARUA-CD) tackles the triple challenge of enabling development that is equitable, resilient to existing and expected climate risks and impacts, and is low in carbon emissions such that African contributions to global warming is reduced. Essentially, ARUA-CD is a strategic, collaborative pan-African response to the climate and development challenges of the continent and the urgent knowledge and capacity needs required to address these. The community of professionals and researchers working on the complex interrelationships between climate change and development is relatively small throughout Africa. Greater expertise is needed to: (i) understand the climate and development challenges threatening the continent's current and future well-being; (ii) co-produce knowledge with society on how to respond to these new risks and challenges, and (iii) co-design, evaluate and sustain context-specific and culturally appropriate innovations and solutions that cut across the SDGs. African-led, engaged transdisciplinary research that spans local, national and transnational scales can help do this by providing the evidence and impetus required for effective climate change policies, strategies and actions that support societal innovation and adaptation to a new and uncertain future. The ARUA-CD consists of three core partners; the University of Cape Town (the African Climate and Development Initiative is the CoE Secretariat and Southern African regional hub), the University of Ghana (the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies is the West African regional hub, and the University of Nairobi (the Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation is the East African regional hub). Each of these CoE members have extensive existing capacity, local and international networks and research and student teaching experience in climate change and development, which provides opportunities for synergy and interaction and a foundation on which to build. Each of the regional hubs reach out to other ARUA and non-ARUA universities in their region following a 'hub and spoke' model, with the Centre as a whole bringing these groups together in a pan-African community of practice. Through this, we envisage the ARUA-CD as a leader and source of inspiration for transformative solutions to the challenges of climate change and development in Africa. The activities described in this proposal all contribute to the core focus of the ARUA-CD, that is, building African capacity for climate and development challenges. Through successful implementation of these activities, this project aims to build capacity in Africa for comparative, engaged and transformative research that enhances decision-making; policy processes and science for impact, towards the goal of an equitable and climate resilient future. These activities build towards supporting capable and skilled African scholars and professionals in confronting the status quo and pursuing state-of-the-art solutions to the complex challenges posed by climate change in Africa. In the vision of improved training and capacity building, we hope to amplify and strengthen African voices in both regional and global platforms. The successful execution of this programme requires efforts in developing open and constructive partnerships with experts, decision-makers, practitioners and with well-targeted communities in order to identify research gaps, co-design projects, co-create knowledge and apply context-appropriate solutions. The activities are designed with the end goal of building a robust and inclusive network of higher education institutions and other partners working on climate change problems and solutions across Africa.

Seven of the world's 10 most unequal countries are located in Africa - this while the continent's population is bound to take a rapidly rising share of the world's population in the next 30 years. Understanding Africa's inequality dynamics is a key component of the international inequality puzzle. The establishment of the African Centre of Excellence for Inequality Research (ACEIR) directly addresses the analytical, empirical and data needs that are required for policy interventions and civil society action the tide against inequality. ACEIR's current partner universities are located in western, eastern and southern Africa. The Centre's launch research programme is aimed at improving the quality and accessibility of relevant data on inequalities in Africa. Equally as important, the ownership of local knowledge production on national and continental inequalities will underline the voice and agency vested in African scholars and research institutions. ACEIR's goal is to contribute to deep, multidimensional and interdisciplinary understandings of inequality in each country context, and a continental and global understanding of how inequalities can be overcome. Our approach includes building capacity for frontier data scholarship and the interpretation of analyses for policy. Textured country-level analyses of inequality that are also anchored in historical legacies of the political economy of African development is in the process of being undertaken. ACEIR researchers will link processes related to inequality within each country to international measurements such as the Sustainable Development Goals. The initial research programme sees researchers working with the national statistical offices to: - Use census, survey and administrative data to profile and map inequality and poverty; - Analyse the dynamics of poverty and inequality by using panel data; and - Use the evidence generated by a set of tax and social expenditure benefit incidence analyses as a platform for dialogue on strategies to overcome poverty and inequality. Each of the Centre's nodes are members of the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA). ACEIR has its hub at the University of Cape Town (UCT), which also hosts the southern African node. The western and eastern nodes are hosted by the University of Ghana, Legon; and the University of Nairobi, respectively. The hub and each node are led by researchers of stature and who are well-established in the contemporary African and broader international inequality communities. This grant will facilitate connecting the Centre into these broad networks, including their own countries' statistical agencies. DataFirst, based at UCT, has over twenty years' experience in the curation and dissemination of data and is the only data service on the African continent to have achieved the CoreTrustSeal certification as a trusted repository. Over the last decade DataFirst has also developed a specific competence in the assessment of data quality issues and in the harmonisation of data. DataFirst will play a central role in the Centre's data preparation, harmonisation and training activities across the three nodes initially, with a longer term view to extending support to the Centre's other partners, including the current partnership with the University of Bouaké, Côte d'Ivoire, and partnerships in the process of being explored, with Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and also Kenyatta University, Kenya. The Centre's establishment is supported by an initial start-up grant from the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) as part of the Research Facility on Inequality funded by the European Union, as well as awards from ARUA and each partner university.

African countries are confronted with a triple burden of malnutrition. This triple burden consists of (i) deficiency of macronutrients leading to malnutrition (ii) deficiency of micronutrients (iii) overweight and its associated diseases. Africa is also faced with the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment. A transformed agricultural and food system is thus a necessary condition for addressing this double-triple challenge. Achieving nutrition and food security in Africa is a complex and multi-faceted challenge, which requires novel approaches, evidence and new policy and institutional enabling environments. The ARUA Centre of Excellence in Food Security brings together ARUA members from East, West and Southern Africa, as well as a broader consortium of African and international partners (AFROFOODS, University of the Western Cape and Leeds University) working on food security research, policy and capacity development to exponentially increase the networks of each participating institution, and to maximise the translation of knowledge into impact at the grassroots and policy levels. It is intended that the network will bring research and academic excellence to the fore throughout the region, developing strong and viable research universities, offering postgraduate training to talented students, and sharing academic resources across universities on the continent. This project sets out to collaboratively build the capacities required across research and policy to tackle this multi-faceted challenge, and help avoid the policy paralysis that in some countries led to little or no progress towards addressing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The project team, which includes the University of Pretoria, University of Nairobi, the University of Ghana, Legon, the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) and the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) incorporates expertise in agriculture, post-harvest losses, land use, food security, nutrition and health, rural livelihoods, and policy and institutional analysis. FANRPAN is a multi-stakeholder pan-African network whose mission is to build resilient food systems across Africa through the assessment and creation of food, agriculture and natural resources policies that are both evidence-based and developed in partnership with non-state actors. RUFORUM supports universities to address the important and largely unfulfilled role that universities play in contributing to the well-being of small-scale farmers and economic development of countries throughout the sub- Saharan Africa region. The consortium will address capacity building and policy development under 5 broad themes: (1) Building capacity in food security through different approaches, (2) Retaining nutrient quality through complementary interventions, (3) Building skills engaging with big data science through the lens of agriculture and food systems, (4) develop policies for optimal nutrition sensitive options, and (5) a high level colloquium. Work will be focused in three countries in Africa: Kenya and Ghana - which are low-income countries with varied farming systems - and South Africa, which is an upper middle income country. In each country, research and policy capacity will be built through collaborative partnerships across academic institutions, non-governmental organisations, policy makers and farmers. Through FANRPAN's inter-governmental policy expertise and platforms, we aim to generate lessons learned from our partner countries and disseminate these across Africa to contribute to capacity building and through the application of an appropriate model of evidence into policy in other African countries, and at the regional level.

Introduction: The UN estimates that 2.5 billion people will be added to the planet over the next 30 years. A large portion of these populations will reside in deprived neighbourhoods including slums, informal settlements, and areas of inadequate housing and face a range of challenges from insecure tenure, to unplanned housing, pollution, environmental risk, and social exclusion. Spatial data on such neighbourhoods are commonly not available. On the occasions that they do exist, they quickly become out-dated. Without up-to-date information on the geography (location and extent) of deprived neighbourhoods and the specific social and physical environmental conditions faced by their inhabitants, the impact of these on health and social outcomes are not traceable and the development of effective interventions is not achievable. However, there is currently no systematic, scalable approach to map deprived neighbourhoods across cities, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Methodology: The project will design an Integrated Deprived Area Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) that will push the boundaries and overcome the weaknesses of each of these current approaches to mapping slums, informal settlements, and areas of inadequate housing. This will be accomplished by joining up a multisectoral and transdisciplinary network of researchers, technologists and societal stakeholders who will collaborate to co-design the IDEAMAPS approach to map and address neighbourhood deprivation and perform pilot studies in Nairobi, Accra, and Lagos, where we have existing strong partnerships and access to existing data (see details below). This approach will consist of an innovative combination of three components: (a) engagement of stakeholders in different scales; (b) modelling and data infrastructure techniques that aim to integrate and leverage the accuracy of field-based maps; (c) an integrative framework, which defines assessment criteria for characterising neighbourhood deprivation in connection with sustainable development. Work Groups: WP1. Stakeholder Engagement- This work package (WP) leads engagement of stakeholders across sectors (e.g. EO, demography, community, policy) in both established and innovative ways to further develop understanding of urban neighbourhood deprivation, and to create enabling environments in which a deprived area mapping system can be implemented. WP2. Integrative Frameworks- This will be dedicated to the synthesis of key requirements and a shared agenda for the IDEAMAPS approach. It will begin with collating existing literature reviews from current and past projects of the research team: specifically, the Improving Health in Slums Collaborative, Surveys for Urban Equity, Million Neighborhoods Initiative, Modelling African Urban Population Patterns, Accra women's health study, and Standardizing City-Level Data-Gathering in Lagos and Accra. WP3. Modelling and Data Infrastructure Techniques. This WP3 collate existing data and methods to test potential IDEAMAPS approaches. Based on the domains of deprivation framework developed in WP 2 with input from stakeholders of WP1, we will develop new area-level environmental (e.g. flood risk) and social datasets (e.g. open sewers), and evaluate modelling approaches that can capture domains of deprivation individually, as well as an overall deprivation "slumness" index. WP2 will also investigate different visualisation targeted at end-users in different scales. The evaluation criteria developed in WP 2 will be used to assess and compare model outputs. Expected Output: The work packages will create a foundation of stakeholder engagement approaches, frameworks, and techniques to scale-up over the next three years to flesh out an integrated deprivation area mapping system (IDEAMAPS) with a capacity to generate more accurate and usable maps and integrate them into community upgrading and advancing progress toward sustainable development goal.