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National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)’s second Global Research Professorship call
UK - Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC)
National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)’s second Global Research Professorship call. The Global Research Professorships programme funds research leaders, with a track-record of applied health research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), to promote effective translation of research and to strengthen research leadership at the highest academic levels. Funding of up to £2m over up to 5 years is awarded to Professors working in close partnership with a research institution in an LMIC.
Efficient Photoelectrochemical Green Energy System based on Hematite Photoanodes Heterostructured with Selected 2D Transitional Metal Dichalcogenides
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
This project addresses the urgent need for sustainable energy solutions by enhancing photoelectrochemical (PEC) water-splitting technologies, which convert solar energy into storable hydrogen fuel. With the increasing global focus on mitigating climate change, the development of efficient, renewable energy technologies is paramount. PEC water splitting, a process that uses sunlight to produce hydrogen, presents a promising pathway to this goal. Our initiative centres on improving the efficiency of hematite-based PEC devices through innovative heterostructures incorporating two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), such as SnS₂, MoS₂, SnSe₂, and MoSe₂. Hematite has long been studied for its potential in solar-driven water splitting due to its strong visible light absorption and favourable theoretical solar-to-hydrogen (STH) conversion efficiency. However, its practical application has been limited by issues such as poor electrical conductivity, slow charge transport, and high recombination rates of electron-hole pairs. By integrating hematite with 2D TMDCs, we aim to overcome these challenges, enhancing the material’s performance through improved charge transfer, reduced recombination losses, and optimised band alignment. This approach promises to boost STH conversion efficiency and achieve the 10% benchmark set for practical applications, making a significant contribution to the development of scalable, clean energy solutions. The project not only advances scientific knowledge but also brings substantial benefits to researchers and institutions in Africa. The collaboration between UK and African institutions facilitates access to cutting-edge facilities and expertise in the UK, which are critical for the successful implementation of this research. African researchers will have the opportunity to train on advanced characterisation tools and gain hands-on experience with state-of-the-art PEC technologies. This exposure is invaluable for building their technical skills and enhancing their research capabilities. Moreover, the project fosters networking and collaborative opportunities between African and UK researchers, promoting the exchange of knowledge and ideas. This international collaboration helps to strengthen research networks, opening doors for future partnerships and joint ventures. African institutions will benefit from the establishment of sustainable partnerships and the development of local expertise in advanced energy technologies. Additionally, the project includes outreach and dissemination activities, which will raise awareness and engage various stakeholders, including the public and industry players. These activities will not only highlight the advancements in PEC technology but also showcase the contributions of African researchers to global scientific progress. In summary, this project is poised to make significant strides in improving PEC water-splitting efficiency, with the added advantage of enhancing research capacity and collaboration between African and UK institutions. By addressing key challenges in renewable energy technology and providing valuable training and networking opportunities, the project aims to contribute to the global transition to clean energy while strengthening the scientific community in Africa.
Co-Designing Clean Energy for Rural Africa with Service Innovations and Digital Twins (CREDiT)
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
CREDiT project aims to demonstrate the potential of solar energy in rural, off-grid African communities through Participatory Technology Development (PTD) and Service-Oriented Business Models, supported by Digital Twin (DT) platforms. The project focuses on three communities facing significant challenges: Mayungu Beach in Kilifi, Kenya; an agricultural village near Kasinthula, Malawi; and an agricultural college community in Chipembi, Zambia. By implementing off-grid solar mini-grids in these areas, the project seeks to generate interdisciplinary knowledge, provide community training, and deliver lasting benefits both locally and more broadly. Led by the University of York (UoY), CREDiT collaborates with Technical University of Mombasa (TUM) in Kenya, Coastal and Marine Resource Development (COMRED) in Kenya, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR) in Malawi, and United Church of Zambia University (UCZ). The project is motivated by the 2023 SDG7 progress report, which highlights the persistent challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa’s access to electricity. Despite abundant solar resources, over 567 million individuals in the region still lack access to electricity as of 2021. Existing solar installations often fail to meet community needs due to a lack of context-specific design, economic viability and are often undersized for expected demand, and the necessary human capital for effective operation and maintenance. The challenge of delivering sustainable and appropriate solar energy solutions is both social and technical. It requires the development of technical and business models that are attuned to social conditions. Addressing this challenge necessitates transdisciplinary collaboration between scientists, engineers, social scientists, business and industry partners, local communities, and policy stakeholders. Rural communities in Africa, often the poorest users, are typically priced out of investment opportunities and face significant challenges such as upfront risks, lack of installation and maintenance expertise, and issues with sustainable affordability. Limited community participation in the design and maintenance of solar projects often results in poor social, financial, and environmental outcomes, leading to projects being abandoned shortly after completion. To address these issues, CREDiT focuses on deploying a template for sustainable business models supported by digitally enabled technologies. This approach aims to guide the development and scaling of distributed solar, maximizing technological performance (energy usage and efficiency, predictive maintenance, reduced waste), social impact (clean energy adoption, equitable benefits, appropriate functionality), and organizational effectiveness (ownership, financing, scalable solutions). The project will develop a replicable process supported by digital technology platforms and business models. These platforms will ensure community-level access to energy, delivering affordable, reliable, long-term sustainable, and equitable energy access in rural off-grid communities. Trials will take place in diverse use-cases across Zambia, Malawi, and Kenya. The digital platform will ensure that all stakeholders, including local government agencies and private investors (national/international), have full visibility of energy production, providing the transparency needed to attract off-grid solar investments. Our approach establishes an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary framework using equitable socio-technical co-design, addressing power dynamics, marginalization, and context-specific knowledge creation by integrating three key perspectives: (1) a digital platform featuring predictive models, IoT sensors, remote monitoring, AI, and cloud-based technologies to support load forecasting, optimal usage, and maintenance; (2) co-produced sustainable business models focused on affordability and equitability; and (3) community resilience and empowerment through skills training, knowledge, and resources, particularly for women, to optimize solar energy use and manage its lifecycle, ensuring future energy expansion.
Mainstreaming Gender Equality and Social Inclusion for a Just Energy Transition in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania (JustGESI)
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
The Global Commission on People-Centred Clean Energy Transitions recommends incorporating Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) in any efforts to advance the energy transition.[1] The Independent Expert Group on Just Transition and Development in Africa advocates for a transition based on social justice and feminist values.[2] The UN Gender and Energy Compact (under the auspices of the SDG7) identifies five outcomes for women to lead, participate in and benefit from a just, sustainable, and inclusive energy transition: increasing women’s access and control over energy resources; incorporating GESI in transition pathways, strategies and regulations; supporting women-owned and led businesses; facilitating women's career advancement in the energy transition; and enhancing the knowledge base to understand processes of exclusion.[3] However, empirical evidence shows a persistent gender and inclusion gap in the energy transition. This gap manifests in the lack of participation of women and gender non-conforming people in the sustainable energy labour force. There is limited knowledge of how gender relations and intersecting forms of social discrimination (such as racism or ableism) reproduce energy injustices in the energy transition. During the last decades, many energy projects have incorporated GESI concerns, for example, collecting gender-disaggregated data or holding single-sex learning sessions. However, such approaches fail to challenge the root causes of discrimination and social inequality. Many projects focus on differences between men and women without questioning the homogeneous, universal categories used to characterise diverse groups and complex experiences of power relations and exclusion. Over-simplifying the relationships between gender relations, discrimination, and access to energy resources leads to decontextualised, inappropriate actions (such as when cookstove improvement programmes make inaccurate assumptions about cooking practices and fuel choices). Such generalisations portray women as passive victims or virtuous stewards in ways that increase their responsibility for delivering collective action without the corresponding rewards (such as when biogas-cooking programmes seek to ‘empower’ women but inadvertently result in additional domestic labour). A GESI-transformative approach to the energy transition requires challenging these types of decisions and practices, which tend to reproduce energy injustices, whatever their intentions. JustGESI will deliver substantive action to advance GESI objectives within the energy transition in Africa, focusing on: How to advance GESI objectives within concrete projects and policy interventions. Identifying and promoting institutional and policy reforms that facilitate GESI objectives. Identifying and delivering forms of capacity building that advance transformative strategies to GESI. This interdisciplinary, international partnership will deliver practical, policy and capacity-building responses through a collaborative programme of work across four countries, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania, where our well-established research network has obtained evidence of inclusivity gaps in the energy transition and are already initiating pilot actions to tackle these. The project will address the Ayrton challenge of ‘smart delivery,’ delivering ‘inclusive energy & leave no one behind’ interventions by putting questions of equality, diversity and inclusion at the heart of the transition to sustainable energy. Simultaneously, the project will address the challenges of ‘super-efficient demand’ and ‘modern cooking services’ by focusing on the delivery of sustainable fuels for cooking. At COP28, world leaders committed to clean cooking for all Africans. However, despite pioneering examples of gender-responsive electric cooking programmes, there is not yet a credible international GESI strategy for clean cooking. [1] https://www.iea.org/programmes/people-centred-clean-energy-transitions [2] https://justtransitionafrica.org/ [3] https://genderenergycompact.org/
Nutrition and the epigenome: early environmental factors influencing human developmental programming
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
iMRC PSMB award seeking to better understand HOW diet affects the laying down of these methylation marks, WHICH areas of the methylome are especially sensitive to such influences, HOW they influence the development of the placenta and fetus, and ultimately WHAT effects these changes have on the baby's development and life-long health. This activity benefits Malawi;Uganda.
An International Collaboration to Implement and Evaluate at Scale the Active Prevention and Treatment of Maternal Sepsis (APT-Sepsis Programme)
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
MRC Joint Global health Trial to carefully answer the question if the Active Prevention Treatment sepsis programme reduces mothers dying or having the most severe infections will involve a clinical trial. This will be done in Malawi and Uganda.
Listen, Learn & Leap: Co-producing Equitable and Sustainable Nature-based Solutions for Climate Resilience in East African Cities
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
"Cities in East Africa face various challenges that exacerbate climate-related risks and complicate resilience-building. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, the potential to realise a more resilient future is also intimately tied to water and nature. This is especially the case for those living in informal settlements (who constitute the majority in both cities), many of which are located within waterways and floodplains that are highly exposed to hydrometeorological hazards and lack adequate drainage, sanitation or drinking water to meet the needs of residents. In these cities as elsewhere, social norms and power relations that designate responsibility for water collection, cooking, cleaning and other care work to women and girls and restrict their mobility outside the home, mean that they are more affected than men and boys by water deprivation and the socio-spatial risks associated with flooding, inadequate water supply and sanitation, and are the first responders to severe flooding and other hazards. These riparian areas are also locations where urban natural assets and buffers are being rapidly lost due to continued urbanisation. Interest in, and awareness of, the potential for Nature-based Solutions (NbS) to support climate adaptation and mitigate environmental risks while also realising various social benefits has been growing. However, there is a lack of evidence and understanding of local experiences of NbS, particularly in low-income informal settlements. Furthermore, a preference for large-scale grey infrastructure projects and related hesitance in policy and planning circles to recognise and invest in localised NbS continues to hinder municipal resilience-building efforts. Yet top-down engineered solutions often fail to reach those most in need, and rarely include community perspectives; young people who make up 70 percent of the population in Kenya and Tanzania remain excluded from urban planning and decision-making. Our project responds to these challenges and aims to fill existing knowledge gaps by exploring the socio-political factors that support the uptake, sustainability and institutionalisation of NbS in African cities. Our objectives are to: 1) Listen: documenting existing knowledge, experiences of, and experiments in managing water risks through NbS to enhance our understanding of the context-specific and communal factors that shape the equity, efficiency and sustainability of NbS, and the barriers and entry points for scaling-up or mainstreaming community-driven interventions into urban planning processes; 2) Learn: by facilitating the co-production of community-driven NbS in informal settlements and developing methodologies that produce actionable knowledge of the environmental, socio-cultural, financial and institutional considerations that drive or derail equitable, sustainable and resilient NbS to urban water issues; 3) Leap: fostering cross-sectoral municipal and regional dialogue and knowledge exchange between community-based organisations, civil society and institutional actors to identify common goals and practical guidance around institutionalising and scaling-up inclusive community-led NbS to advance equitable urban climate resilience in East Africa and beyond. Co-production is central to this action-research to ensure that our inquiry into the possibilities and dilemmas of NbS is grounded in the human experience. We argue that engaging young people, and especially adolescent women and girls, is critical to ensuring that urban resilience-building policies and interventions are both equitable and sustainable in the longer term. The strengths and capacities of our team to deliver this research stems from our diverse disciplinary backgrounds, strong relationships with key city actors, and our track-record in delivering co-produced, community-driven interventions in informal settlements, and leveraging those voices and experiences into policy and planning forums in Nairobi and Dar."
Enhancing climate resilience in eastern Africa by co-developing equitable solutions to land degradation and supporting their implementation
DEPARTMENT FOR SCIENCE, INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGY
Land degradation is a critical problem in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), which exacerbates vulnerabilities to climate change among agro-pastoralist and farming communities in the region. It increases exposure and sensitivity of agro-ecological systems to climate impacts and reduces effectiveness of climate adaptation options, undermining resilience of the affected communities. It is essential to find effective solutions to mitigating land degradation and implement them successfully in order to strengthen climate resilience of agro-pastoralist and farming communities in SSA and build pathways for climate resilient development. The proposed project aims to achieve this with a focus on nature-based solutions (NbS). Our aim is to strengthen climate resilience of agro-pastoralist and farming communities in SSA by co-developing and testing equitable NbS to land degradation, assessing their feasibility and scalability, and exploring evidence-based pathways to facilitating implementation of such solutions by stakeholders. The project outcomes will provide stakeholders at local to international level with evidence of NbS that are acceptable to stakeholder communities, adaptable to different contexts, and applicable at wider scales. To achieve this, we will advance an interdisciplinary and community-based approach, engaging cutting-edge research in soil and agricultural science, group psychology and anthropology, and development studies, as well as stakeholder knowledge and collaboration of local NGOs and policy-makers. The project is structured in three work packages (WPs), engaged in a continuous interdisciplinary exchange. WP1 will build on local knowledge to co-develop multi-purpose NbS to land degradation that strengthen climate resilience, test their effectiveness across contexts, and model their scalability. WP2 will examine the role of gender, youth, and intersectional inequity and vulnerability in the context of land degradation and the associated climate resilience, and explore pathways to implementing equitable solutions that are sensitive to gender and age-defined social differences. WP3 will identify social psychological barriers and opportunities for NbS adoption and test a group-based intervention aimed at strengthening community resilience, well-being, and norms and values supporting NbS implementation. The above aims will be delivered across three field sites in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Kenya, providing opportunities for contextualising across geographic, social, and cultural conditions. Principal outcomes of the project will include new evidence on effectiveness, contextualisation, and scalability of NbS addressing land degradation and the associated climate vulnerabilities in SSA; enhanced knowledge of how equity issues need to be incorporated in NbS implementation; and a tested approach to ensuring temporal sustainability of NbS implementation by addressing community norms and values.
Bank One MRPA
British International Investment plc
Bank One, established in 1997, is a leading bank in trade finance and digital banking technology in Mauritius. It is equally owned by I&M Bank Group of Kenya (which has banking subsidiaries in five countries in Africa), and by CIEL Finance. Through its shareholders, Bank One has a wide reach and access across Africa (over 10 countries).
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Gridworks Development Partners LLP
British International Investment plc
Gridworks is a development and investment platform principally targeting equity investments in transmission, distribution, and off-grid electricity in Africa.
Ethiopia Crises 2 Resilience (EC2R)
UK - Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)
The Ethiopia Crises to Resilience (EC2R) programme is aimed to alleviate the impact of the conflict and drought to the poorest Ethiopians. The programme tries to address urgent humanitarian needs while maintaining the delivery of essential services across the country.
UK Aid Match II Fund
UK - Foreign, Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)
To support the achievement of the Global Goals through funding UK-based civil society organisations to deliver projects that assist in ending extreme poverty and building a better world by 2030. The programme will also provide opportunities for the UK public to engage in international development issues and have a say in how a portion of the aid budget is spent.