Ghana is one of the emerging African countries that is experiencing both, strong population growth and economic progress. Agriculture, water and energy are vital sectors for sustainable development in Ghana. Therefore, future university graduates should be prepared for the market by equipping them with the up-to-date knowledge that tackles the real problems of these three sectors. The carried needs analysis at the three Ghanaian universities has identified three programs that are in urgent need for update and enhancement (BSc. program in Water Resources Development, the MSc. program in Sustainable Energy Engineering Management and the MPhil Crop Science) as well as lacking skills of teaching staff and infrastructure. Based on this analysis, the consortium members have identified five specific objectives to tackle these challenges: 1.Identification of the real-world challenges through in-depth analysis. 2.Enhancing the quality of the identified three study programs through introducing new topics and updating existing ones. 3.Promote and support gender equality through establishing a Gender and Diversity contact point at each of the 3 GH universities.4.developing and implementing a capacity building program for the academic staff.5.Digitalization through enhancing the digital infrastructure as well as developing digital contents.These five objectives are achieved through eight work packages to be implemented over three years. The budget is effectively planned and balanced between the partners. All the partners are involved in the management process. There is a clear quality control plan for all the project activities, deliverables and milestones. The dissemination plan includes different channels to reach as many target groups as possible. The main outputs will be three modern and up-to-date study programs offered by three Ghanaian universities, at least 80 academic staff members capable to teach the new contents and digitalize them.

Achieving clean energy access and food security targets in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will require significant infrastructure expansion. Improved policy environments and governance structures are recognised as vital in scaling up funding for climate-resilient investments in renewable energy infrastructures. The efficient exploitation of land, energy and water resources and their synergised use for sustainable economic development, as well as their robustness to stressors from climate change require integrated optimisation and assessment of strategic plans in these sectors. Working with existing, widely adopted, open-source modelling tools and data, the EPIC Africa project will build on the transparent integrated assessment, and resource modelling, connecting to the already existing community of developers and users. The project will create a network of African experts to train, co-create and sustain the tools developed in the long term, which is lacking at the moment. The project will build advanced and spatially contextualised water-energy-food (WEF) models for long-term infrastructure planning. Operational WEF models with sufficient temporal and spatial resolution will be developed and used to verify cost-optimised infrastructure investment plans under different climate and socioeconomic scenarios. EPIC Africa sets out to support governance of sustainable development in SSA by forming and connecting a transition arena with stakeholders in dialogue, leading to the development of a WEF nexus digital engagement tool. Optimal use of shared resources will be exemplified for Africa using the cases of the Volta and Tana river basins. Here, we will design specific policy, investment and infrastructure plans for the coming decades in the agricultural, water and energy access sectors. The project will produce a set of institutional, regulatory and technical recommendations for sustainable management of optimised transition pathways.

Africa is endowed with a huge proportion of natural resources, including many dynamic young people who find themselves un- or underemployed, no matter what degree of education they have undergone. Higher education institutions (HEI) in the continent faces challenges such as, weak links to the wider socio-economic context, textbook based curricula that do not address the local socio-economic problems and needs and outdated pedagogical methods of delivery.This project is designed to reform Higher Education (HE) study programmes to ensure curricula that are highly relevant to the contemporary economic and social needs of Africa, equipping graduates with skills and competences for employability and self-employment. The project involves trans-African and trans-continental cooperation between HEIs in East and West Africa and in the EU, as well as local cooperation with external stakeholders. The project will contribute to objectives of the African Union Commission (AUC) Strategy, including provision of higher education that matches opportunities and requirements of local labour markets.Project outputs will be 5 study programmes, aligned with local, national and regional needs and priorities, partly or fully redesigned in close collaboration with external stakeholders, to integrate entrepreneurship, innovation and ecological, social and economic sustainability into curricula, delivered through student-centred learning (SCL) approaches, such as, problem based learning, challenge driven learning, team based learning etc.These curricula will serve as 'best practice' examples within the HEI and after project completion each HEI will have a team of trainers who have the knowledge, skills and competences to train and assist colleagues in designing similar programmes. In this way the project will impact on HE, first in the institutions involved and later at the national and regional levels.

Population without access to electricity is set to increase again in 2020 after 6 years of decline in Africa. The number of people gaining access to electricity in Africa has increased greatly: the number of people without access to electricity dropped from almost 860 million in 2018 to 770 million in 2019, a record low in recent years . Nonetheless, past progress is being reversed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In order to tackle this, the present proposal will demonstrate innovative, reliable and adapted sustainable energy solutions based on the valorization of biomass wastes from agriculture and the food industry through biomass gasification. REFFECT AFRICA will adapt and optimize these technologies to a wide variety of biomass wastes: olive mill residues, almond hulls and husks, millet, rice, sorghum or peanut wastes and sugarcane bagasse, among others locally available. Three full- scale demonstrators will be built in Morocco, Ghana and South Africa to consider both urbanized and rural contexts in Africa, on- and off-grid solutions, as well as different socio-economic backgrounds. The project will carry out comprehensive LCA and LCC of each supply chain and will consider the climate adaptation and mitigation potential of this technology compared to other technologies and solutions in the African social, economic and environmental contexts. REFFECT AFRICA will tackle the development of renewable energy sources, providing solutions for on-grid and off-grid communities, and their integration into the existing energy system. It will consider the generation of renewable energy, the transmission, and the use of storage systems.With the aim to closing all water- energy-food links, the project will work on obtaining biochar from the gasifier, and will be improved to provide a valuable fertilizer to local farmers. The demonstrators will include a robust but reliable water laboratory to provide their location with basic but often lacking testing services.