This project critically examines the advancement, projection, and negotiation of "values" by Western aid donor officials in Africa. Defined here as ethical and normative principles that influence and inform political beliefs, interactions, and policies, "values" have always undergirded Western aid relationships with Africa. They have, however, recently received renewed emphasis in the policies of many Western states. Prominent among these is the UK - the focus of this study - where ministers have presented the promotion of values - "British" or otherwise - as a key plank of ensuring that post-Brexit "Global Britain" retains international influence. For "frontline" UK officials in Africa - in the case of "national" staff, African citizens themselves - this presents fundamental challenges. Donor officials are expected to uphold international aid effectiveness norms on partnership and recipient "ownership" of aid. The same officials are also, however, under domestic (UK) pressure to champion (notional) UK values abroad. In some cases, these values may be shared by African interlocutors. In others, however, UK - and other Western - officials and African stakeholders may take directly oppositional stances, departing sharply from a partnership approach. Moreover, some non-Western powers have sought to undercut Western influence through presenting their own engagement as respectful of African sovereignty. This has intersected with criticisms by African leaders of Western value promotion as "neo-colonial meddling", inconsistent, and hypocritical, which resonate with many African peoples. A recent example of how these pressures play out can be found in the international response to Uganda's draconian 2023 "Anti-Homosexuality Bill". Western officials' public condemnations were rejected by Ugandan policymakers as "arrogant" and "imperialist", while rumours of Western aid cuts were met with assurances from Beijing that Chinese aid would remain without "political strings". This project will interrogate how UK officials in Africa experience and seek to balance such challenges, constraints, and countervailing forces in their everyday work and interactions. Drawing on research in Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa, the research will combine interviews, oral history, focus-group discussions, (non-/)participant observation and archival research to answer the following questions: How are "values" understood by UK officials in Africa - and by African host governments, NGOs and civil society groups, and other aid donors? How do both UK officials and their in-country interlocutors assess the effectiveness, or even desirability, of value promotion? Moreover, how does the meaning, significance, and prioritization of different values evolve for UK officials themselves, and with what implications? The research will significantly advance our knowledge of the critical role of frontline diplomatic and development staff in the negotiation of deeply sensitive and consequential areas of policy (dis)agreement and exchange. In doing so, it will refocus scholarly attention on the normative and relational dimensions of UK-Africa policy, including the wider question of what kind of "partner" post-Brexit Britain wishes to present itself as in Africa - a continent which receives over half of UK bilateral aid. Informed by an on-going engagement with practitioners from Africa, the UK, and elsewhere from inception, the research will illuminate the circumstances under which UK - and, by extension, wider Western - donor engagement can effectively amplify the work of African activists. Equally, the research will underline how and when UK and Western value promotion can not only be problematic, but actually backfire, undermining the interests of both the UK and African partners.

My fellowship originally proposed to simulate outbreaks of Ebola throughout western Africa; I originally wrote that "humanitarians are in urgent need of operational intelligence in order to fight increasingly large epidemics". This is truer than ever. Even during the flourishing of simulation for Covid-19 response, it was wealthy countries which saw the development of frameworks for disease projection. These frameworks cannot necessarily translate to Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMIC), as transportation networks and the availability of medical care typically vary drastically with national wealth, and model assumptions do not hold. Data that is routinely collected in some countries and communities may never have been gathered in others. Finally, the skills and targeted tools developed during the pandemic require investments that are simply out of the question for organisations working in LMICs. Humanitarians still need tools suitable for the contexts in which they work. My project renewal seeks to support them in meeting this need. During my fellowship, I have developed an initial agent-based model (ABM) in conjunction with project partners at the World Bank (WB). This partnership emerged during the pandemic, when my colleagues at WB were seeking to develop this kind of platform to support groups such as the Zimbabwe Infectious Disease Consortium (ZIDMC), headed by researchers from Zimbabwe's National Blood service. Both of these are new partners, who join the work going forward. My original project partners, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the British Red Cross, were intimately involved in responding to the pandemic; as pressures have lessened, I have scaled up my collaboration with them, interfacing with MSF's Manson Unit and periodically working out of their offices in London. We have already used the developed framework to explore assumptions made by other researchers, documenting best practice and cautionary examples of built-in modeller assumptions. In the last year of the original fellowship, I will be working closely with colleagues at MSF's Manson Unit to further refine the model and make it usable for their purposes. They are particularly interested in applying the framework to other diseases and understanding how they spread through travel along transport networks. The framework we have developed can accommodate these expansions, but through the renewal I hope to both expand upon the developed framework and also break new theoretical ground. Humanitarian partners are necessarily working with limited resources. Thus, there is pressure for them to make the best possible use of these, in terms of both space and time. The identification of outbreaks in the first place can be challenging in communities without robust testing infrastructure - but through spatial analysis, we can start to explore where humanitarians could maximise their understanding of outbreaks by testing. The existing framework is suitable for research and exploration of epidemic outbreak scenarios, and can be used in conjunction with a larger analytical workflow to identify testing and treatment targets which maximise the impact of humanitarian resources. The renewal of my fellowship would, once more, provide resources to help humanitarians and governments to understand the options available to them in crisis situations. It would also give me the opportunity to emerge from a challenging first few years as a PI and establish myself more firmly as an internationally recognised leader in the field of ABM for humanitarian modelling.