We will study how constructions of religion impact on the formation of gender identities and the significance for participation in violence. Here we will examine links between violence at community, household and state level. Through carrying out participatory action research with community members and religious leaders we will support the development of tools for influencing behaviour leading to changes in gender identities, everyday practices, and violence. Our study bridges gaps between several of this programme's themes. It relates most closely to themes 2 (identity, community, welfare, prosperity) and 3 (religion, violence and conflict resolution).\n\nOur project will explore the relationship of gender identities (ideal sets of characteristics males and females should live up to so as to be accepted within their own communities) to sectarian violence. It focuses on questions such as what gives men such a strong propensity to violence and how is this related to the formation of their identities through their religion. Through action research we will identify how our findings can contribute to public action for reducing violence within communities and families. This should enhance our understanding of how religion can be exploited and made into a tool both for fomenting and reducing violent conflicts. \n\nThe research will take place in the capital of Kaduna State, Nigeria, a site of multiple incidences of sectarian violence. The decision to develop this project arose from a joint project in Kaduna between the researcher and her research partner exploring relations between young people's involvement in communal violence and citizenship. \n\nBoth research partners have worked on violence and conflict. Abah's knowledge of Nigeria and Harris' work on religion and gender issues come together to provide complementary expertise that makes us a team ideally posed to tackle the intersection of gender identities and sectarian violence.\n\nViolence can be taken as damaging physical force deliberately used against other humans for their humiliation. It is strongly gendered both in who performs it and how. Violence always has meaning and sends messages. The strong influence of religion allows its easy incorporation into identity politics. In Nigeria this is strengthened by coincidence with ethnic divides. Violent conflict has been incited by power hungry elites. \n\nLittle attention has been paid to how religions influence the construction of gender identities and still less to their connections to the legitimisation of the use of violence in the name of religion. We will seek to discover how masculinity is shaped by religions and how these are jointly implicated in decisions on whether to participate in violence. We will research women's roles in supporting violence and further explore what participants hope to achieve by violence.\n\nOur research will not merely analyse the problems; it will also seek to reduce violent tendencies by changing patterns of gendered socialisation. It will do this through participatory action research (PAR). In PAR participants use analytical techniques to identify problems and find ways to deal with them. These include tools developed for participatory community development as well as gender training and analysis. Thus, the results of this study should both contribute to theoretical development of this field and provide practical approaches for use in Kaduna and beyond in communities afflicted by recurrent communal violence, including the UK.\n\nWe will use ethnographic methods and participatory research, working with Muslim and Christian men and women from ages 19 to 35, and community and religious leaders with whom we have already good relationships. This work will encourage development of tools for influencing behaviour leading to changes in gender identities, everyday practices, and violence. Our outputs will include scholarly and popular publications, dramas, videos and policy briefs.

A new generation of diagnostic systems available at the point of care (POC) could save lives and reduce the spread of infectious diseases worldwide through early detection and treatment. Optical microscopy remains the gold standard for the diagnosis of many parasitological diseases; however, its accuracy is dependent on the availability and expertise of the analyst at the POC. This limitation is increased by the dependence on labour-intensive examination processes, lack of standardization, high interobserver variability, insufficient precision in sample quantification and, as a consequence, a high misdiagnosis rate. This project introduces an AI diagnostic system leveraging existing microscopes and mobile technology providing a comprehensive and holistic sample analysis rather than just detecting individual pathogens. MultiplexAI is a scalable, low-cost, autonomous AI diagnostic system for the POC that upgrades any optical microscope into an AI agent able to accurately identify any parasite in a sample. We will collect data, train, deploy and evaluate the integrated system to detect multiple diseases including malaria and parasitic Neglected Tropical Diseases. The project will pursue the following objectives and methodological steps: 1) To design a trustworthy AI system, ensuring technical and social robustness, and adherence to WHO AI ethical principles of safety, transparency, explainability, accountability, equity, and sustainability; 2) To develop AI foundational models for microscopy analysis capable of automating the detection, differentiation and quantification of multiple parasites causing disease and integrate them into an automatic mobile microscopy system; 3) To validate the system in laboratory settings; 4) To undertake a performance evaluation study in clinical workflows of four countries in SSA; 5) To assess usability, acceptability and feasibility with end-users and evaluate the cost-effectiveness of its implementation; 6) To model and evaluate the health impact of introducing our system to improve diagnosis and surveillance at both local and national level; and 7) To execute a regulatory roadmap for compliance in EU and SSA, and determine a path to market. Overall, this project aims to unleash the AI revolution leveraging mobile technologies and upgrading millions of optical microscopes into a network of intelligent POC devices, capable of performing high-throughput sample analysis to provide reliable and ubiquitous diagnostics and medical knowledge for everyone, everywhere.

In a recent forum on reinvigorating arts and humanities in Africa, the African Humanities Programme (AHP) highlighted the important contribution they can make to defining African approaches to building scholarship and meeting social challenges. The social challenge the iBali Network is focussed on is the complex combination of factors which exclude young people from learning in urban schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Secondary school education underpins global development strategies, and is seen as a minimum entitlement for equipping youth with the knowledge and skills required to secure decent livelihoods in a globalised world. Enrollment in secondary education has increased nine-fold since the 1970s, but youth in urban areas face under-resourced and overcrowded classrooms, unstable home-environments, crime and gendered social pressures, forced employment, poor sanitation and health challenges. It is young people who have opportunities for schooling, but who are excluded from opportunities for learning, who are at the centre of the iBali Network. Learning exclusions are compounded by the little attention given in African public schools to young people's articulation of their perspectives and experiences of the world they inhabit and the world they want. We propose to create a network of expert and early career researchers (ECRs) and practitioners whose work coalesces around using participatory storytelling to tackle social issues, working at the intersection of GCRF challenges 3 (inclusive and equitable quality education), 8 (sustainable cities and communities) and 11 (poverty, inequality and gender). Storytelling approaches integrate international, scholarly and indigenous narratives and help surface and give value to different forms of knowledge. Through a focus on in-school youth and storytelling, the iBali Network is committed to both the promotion of arts approaches to address development challenges and the democratisation of knowledge about development through the arts. The AHP also highlighted under-funding of arts and humanities departments in Africa, and the limited opportunities scholars working across the arts/development boundary have for networking, collaboration and dialogue. We know from our own experience that creating a critical mass of scholars working across this boundary is compounded by the research methods training available for ECRs working on critical social issues. This sits firmly outside the arts, and predominant methodological approaches can be problematic in how they frame and investigate exclusions from learning. The iBali Network responds directly to these concerns. Through a range of activities which include a methodology-sharing summer school in South Africa, a bidding for funding workshop in Kenya, and sustained support for ECRs from across Africa, iBali aims to mobilise academics using participatory storytelling approaches. The network will demonstrate the approaches by working with academics, practitioners, and teachers and learners themselves to challenge the ways in which youth are excluded from learning in urban education systems. The core team is made up of internationally renowned scholars from Nigeria, Kenya, the UK, Sweden and South Africa. The Advisory Group extends the geographical reach to Ghana, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Sierra Leone. Further, through the recruitment of ECRs, the iBali Network, the methodologies it promotes, and the resulting impact, will be authentically pan-African. Fresh attention and more creative work is required to better understand why youth don't learn in urban schools. Through iBali's focus on storytelling, the arts become a mode of knowledge generation as well as a form of expression and engagement. The intention is to create the starting conditions for a sustainable and scalable network through which exclusions can be surfaced, highlighted and addressed by scholars, activists, policy makers, teachers and the youth of Africa themselves.

Food security in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) is under threat, and unless agricultural productivity in the region doubles within the next 2 decades, it will face major consequences in terms of famine and associated problems. Plant-parasitic nematodes (PPN) are microscopic roundworms whose unmanaged presence has a massively deleterious effect on crop productivity. They infect many plants of great economic importance, including maize, potato, soybean and banana, resulting in annual yield losses of billions of USD worldwide. Notably in SSA, a poor understanding and awareness of nematology within higher education has resulted in a lack of trained nematode scientists and professionals, both in non-profit and private sectors. As a consequence, the importance of PPN management remains overlooked, effectively sabotaging potential for improved agricultural productivity. The inclusion of nematology at the initial stages of higher education in Africa is crucial to maximise the number of students exposed to the discipline, resulting in better-prepared, fully-informed BSc and MSc graduates entering the job market. In SSA, increasing the numbers of well-trained nematology students will be vital in addressing the many nematology-related problems in the area, as well as in providing sustainable solutions to food security and environmental health in the region.The main aim of the NEMEDUSSA project is to support this academic transformation via promotion of nematology in selected Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and by transforming these selected HEIs into regional centres of excellence for nematology education. To achieve this overall objective, the aims of NEMEDUSSA are to:• enhance nematology capacity at HEIs by professionalisation of staff and by upgrading facilities;• develop BSc and MSc modules in nematology to be incorporated into existing HEI programmes; • establish a Pan-African Nematology Network; • disseminate awareness aand information to a range of stakeholders.