Worldwide 10‐15% of pregnant mothers suffer from a mental disorder, primarily depression. Poor health infrastructure and minimal health care resources with less than 1% of the health budget allocated to mental health worsen the mental health gap in low and middle-income countries. This leads inevitably to poor or non-existent access to care. Better education and knowledge on mental health issues have been shown to improve economic prosperity in life. Still, Sub Saharan African (SSA) countries lack the well-educated healthcare professionals to deal with these issues. WHO has firmly stated an urgent need to increase LMIC workforces by an estimated 239 000 full-time staff (e.g. nurses, midwives) to bridge the mental health gap. Malawi, Namibia and Zambia have an urgent demand for higher education and screening and treatment protocols of maternal mental disorders in primary care settings. To respond to this need, the eMAMA project will build capacity and competencies on maternal mental health in SSA. The action research-based methodology of the eMAMA project will be carried out over 36 months. It will involve six (6) work packages (WPs) targeting HEIs, working life and policymakers through four (4) specific objectives: 1) exploring Maternal Mental Health Best Practices, 2) developing Post Graduate Training Programme (30 ECTS), 3) developing an eMAMA mobile application and 4) To ensure project visibility, result's exploitation and wide impact through eMAMA stakeholders. The eMAMA will reform degree programmes on maternal mental health and implement innovation pedagogy and the best practice guidelines in SSA. A number of healthcare professionals (n = 300) participating in the piloting and 30 NGOs with nine participating universities will collaborate during the project lifetime. The project enforces international collaboration, contacts and communication at the policy level and sharing experience and expertise across the EU and SSA.

Kenya, Uganda and Zambia have serious challenges in utilizing the agro-sector jobs and wealth creation potential in national development. The reason for this is that the agro-graduates are not equipped with work-life relevant competences because they are not trained with modern pedagogical methods. Problem Based Learning (PBL) is a powerful way to educate students in systems thinking and to equip them with 21st century relevant competences. Most agricultural Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) do not offer PBL based courses. HEI staff are not trained in using student-centered methods, and university-industry cooperation is weak. European HEIs, such as HAMK, Aalto and UNIPV do research and apply sustainable education approaches for global development. In the AgriSCALE project, the EU HEIs aim to develop a contextualized PBL education method appropriate in SSA. The project addresses the strategic bottleneck of the HEIs to equip graduates with an entrepreneurial mindset and competences to solve complex development challenges in the agro-sector. The project cooperation is based on PBL methodology development, the training of teaching staff on PBL methods and tools, and joint piloting of PBL cases in cooperation with the student teams involved. The objective is to establish PBL into the agro-entrepreneur curricula of the partner HEIs in KE, UG and ZM. EU HEIs bring their PBL expertise to the project and all HEIs contribute to student field challenges; Aalto facilitates PBL learning in real-life contexts; Aalto and HAMK co-lead competence-based quality assurance; UNIPV develops the PBL expert teachers network and Best Practice PBL Manual for dissemination to SSA; and HAMK in the overall management and research-based PBL methodology development. At the end of the project, the six participating HEIs will continue the PBL entrepreneurship courses.