Now showing Programmes related to: "Lancaster University, Lancaster Environment Centre"
Advanced Filters
To search for Programmes in a specific time period, please enter the start and end dates.
Filters Clear all
WASHable: Participatory design and community engagement Network on WASH in Lusophone and Francophone African Countries
UK - Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
The deeply connected history of humans and water presents complex sustainable development challenges. Access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene is recognised as an important human right. However, in countries in sub-Saharan Africa there are still large parts of the population who live in poverty without clean water, and even basic toilet facilities. Unsafe water, sanitation and lack of hygiene leads to a rise in infectious diseases and deaths, especially of young children. French-speaking (Francophone) and Portuguese-speaking (Lusophone) countries in Africa, such as Cameroon and Angola, are affected the most as there are significant inequalities between people living in cities and the countryside and between the richest and poorest; and there has been very little research and investment. Solutions developed for other sub-Saharan countries will not necessarily work in French-speaking and Portuguese-speaking, such as Angola and Cameroon, due the ethnic, social, cultural and language differences that are found in these. Yet, understanding of social, cultural and religious practices have a great impact on the development and adoption of any water, sanitation and hygiene solutions and interventions. Engaging the local communities as well as the local government and other organisations such as NGOs in participating in the development of sustainable and acceptable by the wider community solutions is critical. Important is also the involvement of women and children in this process, as they are mainly responsible for management of household water supply, sanitation, hygiene and household wellbeing. However, there is currently limited knowledge and capacity within African research institutions on how to support this type of positive engagement with communities and co-design solutions with them. The WASHable project, a collaboration between Lancaster University (UK) and the University of Buea (Cameroon) and the Catholic University of Angola, will develop a research network that will provide knowledge exchange and capacity building, addressing the need for African academic organisations to open their doors and work with, in and for their communities. This will be achieved through a series of training and knowledge exchange workshops on arts and humanities approaches held in the UK, Cameroon and Angola, that will focus on engaging communities, women and schoolchildren in water, sanitation and hygiene research. Furthermore, the project will engage policy makers and lead to the development of new research partnerships that will develop culturally-sensitive and gender-mainstreaming projects aimed at delivering safe water, sanitation and hygiene services for Africa. In addition to this, the WASHable research network will, apart from engaging other Francophone (Ivory Coast, Benin, Senegal) and Lusophone countries (Mozambique, Cape Verde) of Africa, also establish an African-wide network through the pan-African experts (from countries in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia) attending the workshops in Cameroon and Angola. This is the first community-based research network on water, sanitation and hygiene in sub-Saharan, and especially Francophone and Lusophone Africa, and is a steppingstone for longer and deeper research collaborations that will be strengthened and sustained even after the end of the project.
Programme identifier:
GB-GOV-13-FUND--GCRF-AH_T008482_1
Start Date:
2020-02-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£54,643.66
Gridding Equitable Urban Futures in Areas of Transition (GREAT) in Cali, Colombia and Havana, Cuba
UK - Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
The success and failure of initiatives tackling the infrastructural gap in most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean are closely related to trends across a region where poverty affects one in every three households and informality is the norm for 57 per cent of the working population (UN-Habitat 2016, 55). Informality itself constitutes a challenge as seen in the reluctance of authorities to invest in areas which, by virtue of not being recognised as legal, fall into a void which neither attracts public investment nor does it encourage entrepreneurs or cooperatives to seek localised relevant solutions. The contrast between Colombia and Cuba provides a unique opportunity to understand the additional challenges that areas in transition - to peace, in the former, and to a new constitution, in the latter - pose to informality and will contribute to developing the kinds of approaches through which these challenges can be addressed more effectively. Building on well-developed partnerships and the learning of several RCUK-funded projects, GREAT will generate real change in two informal off-grid settlements in Cali (Colombia) and Havana (Cuba). Focusing on transport and waste-management community-led projects, the project will contribute to 'gridding' equitable urban futures through a series of three thematic PublicLabs on urban policy, mobility, and waste innovation. These will combine several in-site activities, participatory workshops, seed-funded projects, capacity training, and work with local policy and planning authorities as well as charitable organisations. Joining the expertise of environmental scientists, transport and geomatics engineers, designers, urban planners, entrepreneurs and sociologists, the project will address key SDGs (5, 6, 9, 10, 11 and 16), by embedding the voice of residents of these settlements into ongoing initiatives such as the Territories of Inclusion and Opportunities, an initiative of the Cali Mayor's Office, and the vision of transport in Havana in 2035, approved in 2003, and led by the Dirección General de Transporte Provincial La Habana (General Directorate of Transport Havana). Both institutions are project partners. In doing so, we seek to answer two main questions: In what ways does being on- and off-grid provide an opportunity to rethink the relationship between people and urban infrastructure in areas of transition? To what extent do current off-grid policies and initiatives in Cali and Havana contribute to the disenfranchisement or empowerment of residents in informal settlements? If funded, the project will transform our understanding of the relationship between urban infrastructure and the dynamics of growth and change of informal settlements in areas of transition and provide unique learning points to help address important barriers residents of informal settlements face to improve their livelihoods, in Colombia and Cuba, and across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Programme identifier:
GB-GOV-13-FUND--GCRF-ES_T008008_1
Start Date:
2020-04-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£1,008,533.91
Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund Round 6
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is the fifth most lucrative transnational crime, worth up to £17bn a year globally. As well as threatening species with extinction, IWT destroys vital ecosystems. IWT also fosters corruption, feeds insecurity, and undermines good governance and the rule of law. The UK government is committed to tackling illegal trade of wildlife products. Defra manages the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund, which is a competitive grants scheme with the objective of tackling illegal wildlife trade and, in doing so, contributing to sustainable development in developing countries. Projects funded under the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund address one, or more, of the following themes: • Developing sustainable livelihoods to benefit people directly affected by IWT • Strengthening law enforcement • Ensuring effective legal frameworks • Reducing demand for IWT products Over £26 million has been committed to 85 projects since the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund was established in 2013; five projects were awarded in 2014 (via applications to the Darwin Initiative), fourteen in 2015, fifteen in 2016, thirteen in 2017, fourteen in 2018 and thirteen in 2019 and ten in the latest round in 2020. (more info here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/919053/iwt-challenge-fund-list.pdf): IWT076, IWT077, IWT078, IWT082, IWT083, IWT079, IWT080, IWT081, IWT084, IWT085
Programme identifier:
GB-GOV-7-IWTCF-R6
Start Date:
2020-04-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£3,417,064
Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund Round 4
Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is the fifth most lucrative transnational crime, worth up to £17bn a year globally. As well as threatening species with extinction, IWT destroys vital ecosystems. IWT also fosters corruption, feeds insecurity, and undermines good governance and the rule of law. The UK government is committed to tackling illegal trade of wildlife products. Defra manages the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund, which is a competitive grants scheme with the objective of tackling illegal wildlife trade and, in doing so, contributing to sustainable development in developing countries. Projects funded under the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund address one, or more, of the following themes: • Developing sustainable livelihoods to benefit people directly affected by IWT • Strengthening law enforcement • Ensuring effective legal frameworks • Reducing demand for IWT products Over £23 million has been committed to 75 projects since the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund was established in 2013; five projects were awarded in 2014 (via applications to the Darwin Initiative), fourteen in 2015, fifteen in 2016, thirteen in 2017, fourteen in 2018 and in the latest round in 2019. This round of funding includes the following projects (details of which can be found at https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/811381/iwt-project-list-2019.pdf): IWT048, IWT049, IWT050, IWT051, IWT052, IWT053, IWT054, IWT055, IWT056, IWT057, IWT058, IWT059, IWT0760, IWT061.
Programme identifier:
GB-GOV-7-IWTCF-R4
Start Date:
2018-07-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£4,505,210
Alternative Explanations: Disability and Inclusion in Africa
UK - Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
This collaboratively conceived project will establish the Disability and Inclusion in Africa network. Working across disciplines, the project will engage Arts and Humanities research to enhance disability inclusion in international development. Discourses of disability are often created by medical professionals, social scientists or development agencies, and most often in the global north, quite removed from the realities experienced on the ground. This project focuses on the central theme of 'alternative explanations' for disability in African contexts to invite discussion of a range of beliefs and attitudes towards disability, which may include assumptions and misconceptions, traditional beliefs, religious beliefs, medical determinism, supernatural or witchcraft-related beliefs. By increasing awareness of the impact of these alternative explanations, the network will contribute to understandings of the ways in which approaches to inclusion in international development programmes and strategies can be enhanced. Building on new and existing partnerships, the Disability and Inclusion in Africa network will forge international dialogue between researchers and stakeholders at a series of events and exhibitions in Nigeria, Cameroon, Tanzania, South Africa and the UK. The project not only responds to gaps in scholarship, but the culturally-informed research that will emerge from the project aims to bring about a step-change in the way in which disability studies is approached within and beyond Africa, and in the way in which disability is understood by stakeholders in communities, civil society and international development.
Programme identifier:
GB-GOV-13-FUND--GCRF-AH_T008245_1
Start Date:
2020-02-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£48,237.86
Consumer Cost-Sharing in Primary Care: Unintended Health and Economic Outcomes
UK - Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
In many countries, even insured individuals must pay a fee (usually patient cost-sharing) to see their family doctor. The theoretical purpose of that fee is one of cost-containment: to limit the overuse of doctor visits, although it can also play a role in the funding the health system. An unintended consequence of such fees is that they might prevent individuals from visiting their family doctor for necessary medical conditions. Hence, individuals' health might deteriorate, and in the future they might need much more expensive medical treatments (e.g. hospitalizations), which would defeat the cost containment purpose that the fee was supposed to serve. The importance of this unintended consequence might be growing with the rapid increase in Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), which require timely diagnosis and management through primary care services. For many NCDs, it is easier to postpone doctor visits because they are not painful in their initial stages (e.g. diabetes), but if they are not diagnosed timely and appropriately managed, they will lead to more expensive medical procedures in the future. Visiting the family doctor might help to diagnose the conditions timely, as well as to keep an adequate management of such conditions. Hence, patient fees might be favoring use of hospitals instead of primary care services, which is inefficient because hospital services are much costlier. This inefficiency weakens the health system and limits how much the health system can improve in other dimensions (coverage, quality improvement). Although the literature has been interested in this topic, most previous research has reported associations, which might be spurious. Some recent papers have been able to estimate the effect of patient fees on health, but they have not been able to assess how health care use patterns or overall treatment costs change. These are key issues to understand how patient fees affect the health system (split of resources between primary and secondary care), and its efficiency. To contribute to this debate, we will be testing whether (and by how much) increased patient fees in primary care increase undiagnosed chronic conditions, adverse health outcomes, mortality, use of hospital services, and treatment costs both in the short and long term (up to 7 years). To conduct this work, we will be using health administrative data for the years 2011 to 2018, covering 97% of the Colombian population and containing patients records of all health care services provided in the Colombian Health System, including date and type of service used (outpatient, hospital, etc), prescriptions, treatment costs, ICD-10, sociodemographic characteristics of individuals (including income or wealth scores) and mortality. The person identifier is consistent across the seven years, providing a uniquely rich and detailed longitudinal administrative database. Moreover, its huge size allows us to estimate the effects of interest for particular subpopulations of interest (e.g. individuals with poor socio-economic status, or chronic patients). However, data is not enough to provide a robust answer to the question of interest. We also need a method to be sure that we will not be reporting spurious associations in the data. Experiments are usually used for that purpose but they are unlikely to provide us with long term effects as the ones that we will be estimating, nor the samples be large enough. We are fortunate enough that the patient cost-sharing system in Colombia works ""in abrupt jumps,"" that is, cost-sharing jumps abruptly at pre-specified thresholds of some continuous variables. This is the ideal setting to apply a quasi-experimental method called Regression Discontinuity (RD), which is known to provide causal estimates, free of spurious correlations, under very weak assumptions. Note that you cannot use RD whenever you want, the conditions must be there, but we are fortunate that they do hold in Colombia.
Programme identifier:
GB-GOV-13-FUND--GCRF-MR_T022175_1
Start Date:
2020-09-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£0
NIHR - IMPALA - International Multidisciplinary Programme to Address Lung Health and TB in Africa
Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
The International Multidisciplinary Programme to Address Lung Health and TB in Africa “IMPALA” is a four-year collaborative programme funded by the National Institute of Health Research under the Global Health Research call. IMPALA aims at generating new scientific knowledge and implementable solutions for these high-burden diseases, through multi- disciplinary collaborative work involving clinical, social, health systems, health economics and implementation scientists from Africa and the UK.
Programme identifier:
GB-CHC-222655-IMPALA
Start Date:
2017-06-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£7,048,631.04
PARTNERSHIP, RESEARCH AND CAPACITY-BUILDING FOR YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT SOLUTIONS IN AFRICA (PRAC 4 YUSA)
UK - Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
The policies, strategies and programs introduced to address youth unemployment in Africa (e.g., entrepreneurial skills development, funding young farmers, counseling, investing in accelerators and incubators to support the launch of new businesses) are not working. In sub-Saharan Africa, 64.4 million youth lived in extreme or moderate poverty (less than $3.10 per day) in 2016. Nigeria's youth unemployment rate grew from 11.7% in 2014 to 36.5% in 2018 and youth unemployment rates in Egypt, Kenya and South Africa reached all-time highs in 2017. To design and implement programs that can effectively reduce youth unemployment in Africa, we need to increase the multi-disciplinary research capacity of African university professors, learn from countries that have successfully reduced youth unemployment, engage African youth in the process of identifying the core of the unemployment problem and approaches to solve it, and maintain databases that store and manage large amounts of digital information that is accurate and reliable. The goal of this project is to build significant research capacity across African universities to help reduce youth unemployment in African countries, starting with: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, Senegal and South Africa.The expected outcomes at the end of three years after project start are: i) One high-performing hub that has the capacity to raise external funds, form partnerships, explore entrepreneurial activities, attract excellent mentors worldwide, and anchor a research network across African universities; ii) 12 doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows and 13 faculty members distributed across African universities who can carry out research in how to reduce youth unemployment in Africa; and iii) Models, local best practices and reliable digital data that can be applied to reduce youth unemployment in Africa. To achieve its objectives, the project will carry out five major initiatives: i) Baseline assessment- establishes existing gaps that necessitate research investment; ii) Networking Events - hosts conferences, workshops and seminars; iii) international placement events to develop the capacity to reduce youth unemployed of all the individuals and organizations that are part of the hub-and-spokes network; iv) Research Labs - trains and mentors young academics from the six African countries to define problems, set objectives and priorities, conduct sound research, and identify solutions to high youth unemployment in Africa as well as work collaboratively; v) Infrastructure and Dissemination- documents and updates models, local best practices and digital databases that can be applied to design and implement policies, strategies and programs to reduce youth unemployment in Africa; and shares the reports produced and the digital data that is used and created by the project with all stakeholders. The project comprised of a team of experts drawn from universities in Five African countries (University of Lagos Nigeria, University of Ghana, University of Cape Town, South Africa, University of Nairobi Kenya, and The America University in Cairo, Egypt), three universities in the United Kingdom (Lancaster University, University of Strathclyde , Coventry University and University of Derby) and 2 in North America (Carleton University, Canada and University of Iowa, USA) The investment required is 600 thousand pounds. The funds will be invested in capacity building and networking (70%), scoping studies (20%) and administrative support (10%). This project responds to the urgent need for a multi-country strategic approach to address high youth unemployment rates in African countries. The project greatly benefits young career academics in different African countries because it provides a platform for them to build their research capacities in one or more of the nine focus areas of the ARUA, USD-CoE and the resources that can be leveraged to form partnerships and explore entrepreneurial opportunities
Programme identifier:
GB-GOV-13-FUND--GCRF-ES_T003790_1
Start Date:
2019-09-01
Activity Status:
Implementation
Total Budget:
£614,503.32