Where: SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), U (university), CoE (Centre of Excellence), CSES(Complex Social-Ecological System) & landscape/catchment/watershed: synonymous. The "Water for African SDGs" project will establish & develop the ARUA Water CoE as an effective, high-performance, hub & network of 8 African Universities' researchers & post graduate students. CoE research development will be based on understanding humans living on earth as the intricate coupling of society with the natural world - CSESs. We will forefront community engagement & knowledge sharing for sustainability. We will use research to catalyse change towards social and ecological justice and sustainability, paying attention to African community water and sanitation needs. The Water CoE has developed a systemic image of the SDGs as a planning, practice & evaluation tool. The image has SDG 6, Clean water & sanitation, at the centre, linking two primary water cycles: i) Water in a Catchment (rainfall, run-off, ground water recharge, evapo-transpiration, evaporation); & ii) Water Services - supply & sanitation (raw water from the natural resource, often in dams, pipes & pumps to water treatment works, treated potable water to households, waste water to treatment works & discharge into the natural resource). Several nodes place their water research in a climate change context (SDG 13), and acknowledge that water is integral to SDG 15 (life on land), 11 (sustainable cities & communities), & 12 (responsible consumption & production), Effective water resource management, supply and sanitation requires good water governance by strong institutions (SDG 16). The Water CoE itself embodies SDGs 17 (partnerships to reach goals), 4 (quality education) & 5 (gender equality). Each CoE node has strengths in different parts of these cycles. This project brings together strengths, so nodes can flexibly link & respond innovatively to research funding calls, & effectively apply research. Capacity-building, exchanges and mentorship will mainly be addressed through the development & delivery of a 3-day course by each node, to 14 participants from 3-5 other nodes. Participants will be doctoral students, early-, mid-career & established researchers. Nodes will host a course on their primary strength, nodes will co-develop courses out of secondary strengths. In Year 1, the hub (Rhodes U), will deliver a core foundation course to 3 delegates from each node (total 21), on Adaptive Integrated Water Resources Management (A-IWRM), including the CSES concept, transdisciplinarity and water governance. Node courses will run over Years 1 & 2, and an early identification of course areas is: Landscape restoration & catchment water use (Addis Ababa U, Ethiopia), hydrology, geohydrology & hydraulic regimes for IWRM (U Dar es Salaam, Tanzania), optimising benefit from dams (Cheikh Anta Dio U, Senegal), biodiversity, natural resource management, water-energy-food nexus (U Rwanda), urban water pollution (U Lagos, Nigeria), urban water quality design (U Cape Town, South Africa), & water in future cities (Makarere U, Uganda). Course days will include time to work on research proposals. In Year 3, activities will focus on grant applications and a Water CoE delegation attending a relevant international conference to present the outcomes of the whole project. Over the 3-year period, each node will have one opportunity to invite/visit an international specialist, & by the end of year 3 at least 3 collaborative research projects will be running, each progressing an SDG challenge-area. Spin-off companies in water & sanitation could be emerging, and each node will have community-based water and/or sanitation impact successes. At least 24 early career researchers and 24 doctoral students will be mentored through the CoE. We will demonstrate the clear emergence of an African water research cohort, addressing water-related SDGs, with positive outcomes and impact.

MAP aims to provide a comparative approach on the use of interdisciplinary arts-based practices for peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, Indonesia and Nepal. MAP has the overall goals of first, influencing curricula and approaches to working with in- and out-of-school youth and second, creating structures and modes of communication between youth and policymakers from the local to global. Each country has different histories and approaches to peacebuilding, yet all four have a rich tradition of using cultural forms for dialogue. The selection of the four countries will enable us to explore how pathways to peace may be shaped by diverse political, cultural, religious and linguistic factors, as well as the crosscutting issues of gender and intersecting inequalities, environments and the exclusion of children and youth from policymaking processes. MAP will operate across three core components: a) project design and delivery; b) research; and c) arts-based practice that run throughout three strands of activities. Strand One will involve scoping visits, literature reviews, community mapping and training of adult and child/youth facilitators in arts-based methods for dialogue and research. During Strand Two, up to 3 small grants of £5,000 will be awarded in each of the four countries for child/youth and adult MAP trainers to work alongside CSOs to develop projects that address local issues that may incorporate (but are not limited to): child rights-based decision-making; child protection and peacebuilding. Up to 2 grants of £29,500 in each of the four countries for youth to work alongside policy-focused organisations to explore arts-based communication structures. Up to 4 large grants of £100,000 in each of the four countries for researchers of any level and partnering organisations to design and deliver effective monitoring, evaluation and impact delivery alongside the small and mid-size grant awardees. One additional large grant of £100,000 will be awarded in the final two years of the project to synthesize findings, drawing out similarities and divergences across the four countries and to consider questions of scalability and transferability, in order to inform youth policy at an international level. Strand Three will involve the coordination of community-based dialogue groups and MAP Clubs to inform policy and establish communication structures alongside synthesis and dissemination. The project will be working alongside cultural organisations, youth-serving CSOs, conflict and peace building CSOs, government institutions and ministries, higher education institutions, conflict management, and psychosocial wellbeing organisations. In this way, the project promises diverse impact at local, national and international levels. We will explore the following questions: 1. How can different art forms be used to co-design, deliver and evaluate peacebuilding curricula and other approaches for working with children and youth to address local conflict issues? 2. How might cultural forms be used for dialogue with and between children and youth, educators and policy makers to advance peacebuilding through a local and indigenous approach? 3. How might psychosocial support, including local healing practices, be better integrated within peacebuilding approaches by using the arts to promote the wellbeing of children and youth, especially those from marginalised groups? 4. How can cultural forms be incorporated into child- and youth-led participatory action research methodologies and adapted for the purposes of the design, undertaking and delivery of interdisciplinary projects in diverse social, political and cultural contexts? 5. How might these cultural forms be used to create alternative spaces and communication structures for peacebuilding approaches and curricula development to inform local, national and international approaches to peacebuilding.

The aim The IPOW Anniversary Initiative is to develop and support new and emerging artists from sites of conflict, crisis and post conflict by nurturing their creative talent, enhancing creative enterprise skills and showcasing their work on an international platform. The project features alternative creative workshops for marginalised artists, a mentoring network for creative entrepreneurs and the dissemination of these artistic projects to the general public via The Guardian and Taschen publishing. The IPOW Anniversary Initiative emerged from 10 years of research visits, observations and interactions with creative communities in sites of conflict, post conflict or communities in social, political or economic crisis. IPOW's research revealed that creativity served as a powerful tool in times of social and political upheaval. Art can provide a means of resisting violence, preventing conflict, healing individuals and communities and enabling communities to re appropriate space consumed by war. However, whilst creativity is utilised to address social, psychological and cultural needs, artists often lack the skills or outlets to exploit the economic value of their talents. Furthermore, communities affected by conflict or crisis did not have access to the necessary educational tools to develop their creative projects or to connect to audience. In its most recent phase (2013-2014) In Place of War had attempted to address this skills gap by delivering informal creative entrepreneurial workshops on the ground to marginalised communities. However, it was apparent that informal workshops over a short period of time had little impact in developing skills or enhancing exposure. To this end, In Place of War has created structured knowledge exchange workshop certified by the University of Manchester. The Creative Entrepreneur Workshop (CEW) is structured over nine weeks and draws upon creative practice identified through IPOW's research. All this material would not have been available without the extensive research and practitioner networks developed through AHRC support. In addition to this, artists have the opportunity to develop a creative business proposal which will presented at the end of the sessions. Industry experts will give feedback on creative proposals and artists will be allocated a mentor to support theml. Furthermore, the most viable project will be awarded a small seed fund to support the development of the project. In addition to this, IPOW will work with Tacshen Publishing to offer mentoring support for new and emerging visual artists on the CEW. The CEW and mentoring network will nurture a new generation of artists and practitioners from sites of conflict or extreme disadvantage by creating a research-informed, free at the point of use educational tools and professional support system. As part of this new stage of development, IPOW has developed a relationship with the Guardian to disseminate and engage with new public audiences. IPOW been invited to programme 6 events at the Guardian Space in London. This unique collaboration will provide an innovate public space to present new and emerging talent identified via the CEW, giving artists an international platform, thus expanding opportunities. This partnership will facilitate connections between artists and international audiences, increase avenues for dissemination, and generate public debates on the role of arts in society. Responding to the need to generate economic benefits and improve access to international audiences for marginalised artists, IPOW will also work with Taschen Publishing to publish a book on art in conflict zones. Artists featured in the book and will receive a percentage from book sales. The proposal aims to provide tools for creative entrepreneurship, support mechanisms for artistic development and new pathways for dissemination and engagement with international audience for artists from conflict and post conflict zones.

Africa is a continent blessed with immense human potential, but it faces a lot of complex and stubborn developmental challenges. Home-grown solutions to these challenges are slow to emerge as there is a drastic shortage of researchers on the continent, which means that there are not enough academics to do the research required nor are there enough academics to train the next generation of young researchers who need to do this research in future. On top of these constraints, tackling problems dealing with development is a complex and nuanced issue which needs the input from a lot of different scientific disciplines, but getting different disciplines to work together effectively on a common goal is a problem in itself. The project sets out to tackle the shortage in research capacity in Africa by developing a set of training and research activities aimed at bringing young researchers on board, and by creating the opportunity for experienced researchers to also participate in research groups that span different scientific disciplines. The training of researchers will happen in two ways, (i) by a set of very targeted courses aimed at developing the skills required to plan and do good research, and to make the results useful to other groups of people who may want to use the results, and (ii) through setting up research groups around a particular problem, where the research groups will contain a mixture of young and experienced researchers, and researchers that look at the problem from different perspectives e.g. from engineering, agricultural or human and social perspectives. In this way, the development of young researchers will be accelerated so that more people are trained to take up and deal with the rigours of an academic career, while the opportunity for young researchers to learn from more experienced ones is invaluable to make sure that they receive good training. The project will further focus specifically on topics of how renewable and sustainable energy can be applied in different African settings in an way that ensures that benefits are shared equally, and that different groups and specifically women get the opportunity to benefit. In particular, methods will be sought to employ renewable energy to benefit African small farmers and the entire food chain from farmer to market. Small farms and the distribution of products from these farmers is extremely important in Africa, as these small farmers collectively produce up to 70% of the continent's food, and any improvement that they can gain through using renewable energy in their farming and households is likely to make an important impact on their lives. However, in order to develop solutions that are successful and useful to them, one needs to approach the question form many different angles, including the type of technology, where and how to incorporate it into the farming or food chain activities, who are the people who will benefit, how they will benefit and whether the solution can be improved to make sure that a larger number of people will benefit. A further specific topic area will be on how renewable energy can be applied in large informal settlements to address scarcity to energy, and how to ensure that particularly women are empowered through renewable energy solutions. Through taking a broad approach to renewable and sustainable energy issues in Africa, and combining dedicated training and research activities, the project hopes to make an important contribution to training the top class African researchers of tomorrow, and to broaden their knowledge on how to tackle some of the most pressing developmental concerns on the African continent by working together with researchers who may not be in the same field as themselves.

Trees take in carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, but this is eventually released when they die. The sheer number of trees in tropical forests means that small changes in these rates of growth and death, and the resulting change in the balance of carbon taken in or released, can have a big effect on the climate. While a lot of research has focused on how changes in temperature and rainfall affects the growth and death of tropical forest trees, the potential effects of lightning have been largely neglected. A study tracking lightning strikes in Panama found that they caused more than half of all deaths of large trees, a previously undocumented effect despite being in one of the most intensively studied forests in the world. This project will provide important steps towards assessing whether this strong impact of lightning is a more widespread phenomenon. Forests in Africa are characterised by a greater dominance of large trees than elsewhere in the tropics, so based on results from Panama they would be expected to be more vulnerable to lightning. Alternatively, the high frequency of lightning in Africa may have selected for trees that are better able to withstand its effects. Knowing whether or not lightning has a consistent effect across continents is important for determining whether future work should focus on understanding the causes of variation in the impact of lightning, or can instead explore the wider implications these effects. The new international collaborator (Evan Gora) has developed an approach for detecting lightning damage from drone surveys and follow-up investigation on foot that allows large areas of forest to be surveyed. We will apply this at four sites along a dramatic gradient of lightning frequency in the Albertine Rift (on the boundary of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda) to (1) test whether trees at different sites in Africa are more or less vulnerable to being killed by lightning than those in Panama, (2) determine how forest structure varies with lightning frequency and (3) use these observations to assess the potential effect of lightning on carbon stocks and dynamics. The project team will have regular online meetings throughout the project, will all meet in Rwanda to receive training from Gora in how to detect lightning damage, and a subset of the team will also meet in the UK after fieldwork. Collectively, these meetings provide considerable space to share ideas as the project develops, culminating in a five-year plan for future collaboration. We will seek wider input from scientist and stakeholders through a regular series of seminars and roundtable discussions, and will hold online training workshops to build capacity in monitoring the effects of lightning on tropical forests.