AURORA aims to gather scholars from diverse intellectual disciplines, professionals and practitioners to examine RTAs, AfCFTA and Africa’s engagement with the EU in international affairs. Developing Africa’s actorness should, then, be informed by lessons and parallels from across Africa and, chiefly, the EU—particularly European Political Cooperation (EPC)—which became a region engaged in global affairs with unified external policy reflected in, among others, the Lisbon Treaty. AURORA will consolidate international networks beyond the convenors’ collaborators to add value to the project and provide comparative knowledge on FTAs, especially from the EU. It will involve and introduce local students to the AU, EU and regionalism. AURORA will increase the level of student engagement in AU, EU and regionalism issues to ensure continuity into the future.

Africa has the fastest growing population in the world. At the same time the continent has some of the highest rates of infertility. Most people long to have children for diverse reasons. Those unable to have children seek ways to improve their chances of conceiving. These may include biomedical interventions, vernacular healing practices, changing or adding partners or making kin through adoption and child circulation. Yet despite the diversity of lived experiences and practices of reproduction across the continent, most research and interventions into reproductive health in Africa frame it primarily in terms of risk, pathology, mortality, and irresponsibility. Doing Natality engages a team from four African countries, working across demography, social sciences, medical humanities and science and technology studies, to develop a research agenda that centers the notion of “doing natality”. We aim to explore practices of doing natality as articulation of love, care, beginning something new and securing better futures in raising children. We thereby open up a new space to interrogate and explore the usefulness of the notion of “doing natality” as heuristic, theoretical and methodological tool by asking what it means for African women, men and couples to have (or not have) children. Through the award, we aim to influence future studies of reproduction in Africa. We will build and strengthen a research network on the continent and create an environment that supports a cohort of early and mid-career researchers to drive the research agenda for the years to come. We believe this is important because social realities in Africa are regularly misrepresented; in order to correct this, it needs research from the continent on the continent. The topic of the research network is reproduction in four African countries (Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda). Most research and interventions into reproductive health in Africa frame it in terms of pathology, mortality, and irresponsibility. Instead, we ask what it means for African women, men and couples to have (or not have) children and explore in what ways love, care, beginning something new and securing better futures are expressed in in raising children.