The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed unimaginable challenges on higher education institutions globally. Ghana recorded its first case of the Coronavirus on March 12, 2020. Consequently, its government implemented a series of measures including a lockdown of all educational institutions to slow the spread of the virus in the country. This government directive interrupted the academic calendar for all institutions through the country, requiring UCC and UEW to implement innovative solutions to address the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic to bring the 2019/2020 academic year to a successful close. Need for this project is derived from lessons learned during the pandemic and aiming beyond. There is opportunity to change course digital delivery in higher education institutions in Ghana and build sustainable digital learning policy in sub-Saharan Africa.Scaling up digital education delivery calls for strategic planning and development of existing and innovative pedagogical methods specific to digital delivery. The project will result in the development of an educational research based action plan, which will include the development of the delivery system and training. This will enable the facilitation of digital educational innovation and research at UCC and UEW. The project thus intends to cause a shift towards data-driven and evidence-based methods of providing digital education at UCC and UEW, changing the thinking of researchers, educators and digital solutions providers.The project has strong emphasis on professional development of HE teachers in Ghana and the significant impact is founded on building capacity for digital delivery. It is established by having suitable strategy, sufficient policies and putting those into action. Participating universities are current and future forerunners of utilising digital learning environments. The project will build lasting impact on the target area and the results support equality and inclusion among

SESASA aims at developing a “system of systems (SoS)” for assessing agricultural land-use-and-management-change scenarios and provide adaptive feed-back. SESASA will connect farmer responses to social, economic and climate changes at local scale with planning and policy instruments at national scale. SESASA will explore spatio-temporal opportunities to harmonize conflicts between arable farming, grazing and pastoralism. Our theoretical framework builds on social-ecological systems and considers systemic properties such as emergence effects that arise from a non-predictable amplification of management impacts on the availability of natural resources. Research/ innovation questions the project intends to address: 1. How can social-ecological-systems be operationalized in terms of smart modelling approaches and architectures to enable a highly flexible and low data demanding assessment of the performance of agro-ecological systems? 2. Which adaptation opportunities for arable farming, grazing and pastoralism – using scenarios – are most recommendable in different agro-ecological zones to minder food and water insecurity? 3. How can we transfer such an approach into decision making and consulting? Accounting local land-management practices in large scale simulations is indispensable for understanding complex social-ecological interactions and requires a highly integrative knowledge processing approach based, for instance, on graph-node theories to reflect the complexity of drivers, agents and nature-human interactions of agro-ecosystems. We suggest implementing a multi-disciplinary SoS including the models ECOSERV (France), GISCAME (Germany) and MOWASIA (Burkina Faso) + research on planning and management practices (Burkina Faso, Ghana), environmental assessment (Ghana, Germany) and perceptions of local experts and actors (Burkina Faso, Ghana). This ensemble will be implemented to explore multiple trajectories of agro-ecosystems at nested scales.

DigiGradAfrica aims to enhance the quality and relevance of training for graduate students and young researchers in Africa, especially for the attainment of Africa regional and global development goals, through harnessing the opportunities provided by digitalization and internationalization. DigiGrad Africa assumes that international collaborations/partnerships are one of the ways of enhancing research capacities/postgraduate training in Africa and new opportunities of digitalization can be strategically deployed to enhance internationalization and research/postgraduate training capacities in African universities.The partnership unites 8 universities from Ghana, Kenya, Burundi, and South Sudan, drawing on their different strengths and catering to their different capacity needs, who are members of the African Network for Internationalization of Education who coordinates the project with support from OBREAL Global and universities from The Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Belgium. The project will:Refine and articulate HEI strategies for digitalization and internationalization, specifically as it relates to training graduates and young researcher; Build HEI staff capacity in African universities to manage internationalisation of graduate studies, including the capacity to facilitate greater intra-African student and researcher exchange; Build HEI staff capacity in African Universities to use digital tools to strengthen graduate and post-graduate training and internationalise it; Build the capacity of young researchers to exploit digitalization, develop and sustain a network of young African researchersThe outputs include: The development of robust strategy documents for digitalising, internationalisation, and research enhancement and a Handbook; HEI research supervisors and staff of IROs are trained in harnessing digitalisation for internationalisation; A virtual post-graduate student training programme is launched; An African young researchers' network is lauched