The Food Systems Research Network for Africa (FSNet-Africa) will strengthen food systems research and its translation into implementable interventions in support of interrelated Sustainable Development Goals related to food systems in Africa (focusing on SDG2 - Zero Hunger). The network partners - University of Pretoria (UP) (ARUA-CoE in Food Security host), University of Leeds (UoL) (GCRF-AFRICAP host) and the Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) (GCRF-AFRICAP partner) have been selected based on their track record of working together, strengths in food systems research and existing partnerships with food systems stakeholders. The major contribution of FSNet-Africa to addressing the challenge of SDG2 will be its focus on developing a new understanding of the African food systems through developing the FSNet-Africa Food Systems Framework and utilising systems-based methodologies to conduct research that enhances understanding of the components of the framework, the interactions between these components, and ultimately the leverage points for food system transformation. The latter will be implemented by an interdisciplinary cohort of early career research fellows (ECRF) who are supported in their research to identify (in dialogue with food systems stakeholders) and evaluate climate-smart, nutrition-sensitive, poverty-reducing interventions. FSNet-Africa will collaboratively produce context-relevant, interdisciplinary research through creating 2-year long structured opportunities for up to 30 ECRF, majority female, who obtained their PhD's less than 10 years ago to (i) conduct impact-focused, gender sensitive, interdisciplinary research related to African food systems, (ii) build lasting research networks, and (iii) develop their skills to translate their research impactfully. ECRF will be selected from 10 academic partner institutions in six countries - Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia. The three formal components of the fellowships (science, mentorship and leadership development) will ensure that the ECRF are positioned in the necessary enabling environment and are provided with the opportunity to develop the necessary skills to produce excellent research, achieve the project objectives and significantly advance their academic careers. During the fellowship, each fellow will be assigned at least two mentors - one from an African university and the other from the UK. These research-triads will be carefully matched to ensure that the triad is an interdisciplinary team, enabling the ECRF to receive the support they need to develop and implement quality interdisciplinary research projects. The Science Component of the fellowship will be comprised of a fellowship orientation workshop, funding for research, participation in a split-site winter/summer school and a write-shop. After attending an Orientation Workshop with their mentors, ECRF will be expected to develop their research proposals that focus on climate-smart, nutrition-sensitive and poverty-reducing food systems solutions. Six months later, a 10-week split-site winter/summer school (at UP's Future Africa Campus and at the University of Leeds) will provide the ECRF with the opportunity to finalise their research proposals for implementation and to participate in various capacity development workshops. The Leadership Component will give ECRF the opportunity to develop skills the skills they need to be future food systems science leaders - such as managing research teams and leadership in science-policy communication. As a mechanism to facilitate research uptake and impact, every project undertaken by the ECRF will be co-designed and implemented in partnership with relevant policymakers, private sector role players or grassroots level organisations who will engage directly with the research teams at the Orientation Workshop, during the Winter School and in-country to implement the research.

The ARUA Centre of Excellence in Climate and Development (ARUA-CD) tackles the triple challenge of enabling development that is equitable, resilient to existing and expected climate risks and impacts, and is low in carbon emissions such that African contributions to global warming is reduced. Essentially, ARUA-CD is a strategic, collaborative pan-African response to the climate and development challenges of the continent and the urgent knowledge and capacity needs required to address these. The community of professionals and researchers working on the complex interrelationships between climate change and development is relatively small throughout Africa. Greater expertise is needed to: (i) understand the climate and development challenges threatening the continent's current and future well-being; (ii) co-produce knowledge with society on how to respond to these new risks and challenges, and (iii) co-design, evaluate and sustain context-specific and culturally appropriate innovations and solutions that cut across the SDGs. African-led, engaged transdisciplinary research that spans local, national and transnational scales can help do this by providing the evidence and impetus required for effective climate change policies, strategies and actions that support societal innovation and adaptation to a new and uncertain future. The ARUA-CD consists of three core partners; the University of Cape Town (the African Climate and Development Initiative is the CoE Secretariat and Southern African regional hub), the University of Ghana (the Institute for Environment and Sanitation Studies is the West African regional hub, and the University of Nairobi (the Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation is the East African regional hub). Each of these CoE members have extensive existing capacity, local and international networks and research and student teaching experience in climate change and development, which provides opportunities for synergy and interaction and a foundation on which to build. Each of the regional hubs reach out to other ARUA and non-ARUA universities in their region following a 'hub and spoke' model, with the Centre as a whole bringing these groups together in a pan-African community of practice. Through this, we envisage the ARUA-CD as a leader and source of inspiration for transformative solutions to the challenges of climate change and development in Africa. The activities described in this proposal all contribute to the core focus of the ARUA-CD, that is, building African capacity for climate and development challenges. Through successful implementation of these activities, this project aims to build capacity in Africa for comparative, engaged and transformative research that enhances decision-making; policy processes and science for impact, towards the goal of an equitable and climate resilient future. These activities build towards supporting capable and skilled African scholars and professionals in confronting the status quo and pursuing state-of-the-art solutions to the complex challenges posed by climate change in Africa. In the vision of improved training and capacity building, we hope to amplify and strengthen African voices in both regional and global platforms. The successful execution of this programme requires efforts in developing open and constructive partnerships with experts, decision-makers, practitioners and with well-targeted communities in order to identify research gaps, co-design projects, co-create knowledge and apply context-appropriate solutions. The activities are designed with the end goal of building a robust and inclusive network of higher education institutions and other partners working on climate change problems and solutions across Africa.

Warning of a global "learning crisis" in education, the World Bank recently claimed that without learning, education will fail to deliver on its promise to eliminate extreme poverty and create opportunity and prosperity for all. In response, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been proposed as having the potential to accelerate the process of achieving global education goals by reducing barriers to access education, automating management processes, and optimising methods for improvement of learning outcomes. In order to realise this vision, public and private partnerships (P3s) are being established where artificial intelligence in education (AIEd) initiatives are being rolled out in developing countries in an effort to spur innovative digital transformations in education. However, while AI in and for education is claimed to bring many benefits, it also potentially brings as many challenges, including social, political, economic, and ethical consequences. While the AI solution has considerable merit, a significant problem facing policy-makers, practitioners, industry and other relevant stakeholders is that there are no tangible indications that AI in education will promote the desired shifts or evidence of the impact that introducing such systems might have on the social life of Global South school communities. In light of this, the Fair-AIEd project will examine the impact of P3 initiatives on the use of AI in education in two African contexts as examples of emerging market economies (Ghana and South Africa). As well as the implications that AI systems might have for teaching and learning, the project will investigate potential benefits, harms, and risks associated with the leadership roles corporations play in design and use of AI within the educational practices of developing nations. A key successful outcome of this project will lie in establishing a baseline for further research which seeks to understand the impact of AI in education in the Global South. The project is guided by the following questions: RQ1: What are the social, political, economic, pedagogical, and ethical implications of embedding AI systems into international education and development contexts? RQ2: How can P3 partnerships most effectively channel machine learning to drive fair-AI innovation for international education and development? RQ3: How can governments facilitate the creation of ethical AIEd policies for development goals? Potential impacts will be explored using ethnographic case-studies. Informed by data obtained in the field, stakeholders from industry, government, academia, and civic groups will co-design an Algorithmic Impact Assessment tool that can be responsive to diverse populations. Using fair-ML (Machine Learning) as a point of reference, the framework will identify key cross-cultural values and social issues against which the implications of AI in education can be identified and evaluated. Design of the tool will incorporate a local adjustment resource to accommodate cultural, religious, or other sources of value differences that emerge from field work. The Impact Assessment will be piloted in six K-12 schools across Ghana and South Africa to determine the effectiveness of the tool. The impacts of AI technologies will be listed, mapped, and analysed to illustrate key issues and concerns in this emerging landscape and to identify potential for positive educational change. Upon identification of benefits, harms and risks as they apply to AIEd, stakeholders will then co-design and develop a Fair-AIEd Trust Mark. The Mark will be useful for the educational leadership of developing nations as they choose corporate partners and technical systems for their schools. Development and use of this tool will also provide guidance to companies who are willing to commit to the ethical principles upon which their educational technology proposals will be judged in terms of localising software and understanding regulatory compliance.

Collating information on human health and disease, and understanding the biological processes that may cause disease can help identify ways to develop new treatments for these diseases. The use of complex statistics, computational resources and genetic information has greatly facilitated our understanding of human disease. For Africa to fully benefit from the technological advances in computing and ways to store and manage "big scientific data", we will need to ensure that African researchers have access to such resources locally. As part of an international collaboration, we aim to build a computational network and resource in Uganda, and train the next generation of African computer scientists as part of this initiative. This project will help facilitate our understanding on diseases in Africa and also provide a way to assess changes in the prevalence of these diseases, including HIV and other chronic diseases such as diabetes.

The policies, strategies and programs introduced to address youth unemployment in Africa (e.g., entrepreneurial skills development, funding young farmers, counseling, investing in accelerators and incubators to support the launch of new businesses) are not working. In sub-Saharan Africa, 64.4 million youth lived in extreme or moderate poverty (less than $3.10 per day) in 2016. Nigeria's youth unemployment rate grew from 11.7% in 2014 to 36.5% in 2018 and youth unemployment rates in Egypt, Kenya and South Africa reached all-time highs in 2017. To design and implement programs that can effectively reduce youth unemployment in Africa, we need to increase the multi-disciplinary research capacity of African university professors, learn from countries that have successfully reduced youth unemployment, engage African youth in the process of identifying the core of the unemployment problem and approaches to solve it, and maintain databases that store and manage large amounts of digital information that is accurate and reliable. The goal of this project is to build significant research capacity across African universities to help reduce youth unemployment in African countries, starting with: Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Egypt, Senegal and South Africa.The expected outcomes at the end of three years after project start are: i) One high-performing hub that has the capacity to raise external funds, form partnerships, explore entrepreneurial activities, attract excellent mentors worldwide, and anchor a research network across African universities; ii) 12 doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows and 13 faculty members distributed across African universities who can carry out research in how to reduce youth unemployment in Africa; and iii) Models, local best practices and reliable digital data that can be applied to reduce youth unemployment in Africa. To achieve its objectives, the project will carry out five major initiatives: i) Baseline assessment- establishes existing gaps that necessitate research investment; ii) Networking Events - hosts conferences, workshops and seminars; iii) international placement events to develop the capacity to reduce youth unemployed of all the individuals and organizations that are part of the hub-and-spokes network; iv) Research Labs - trains and mentors young academics from the six African countries to define problems, set objectives and priorities, conduct sound research, and identify solutions to high youth unemployment in Africa as well as work collaboratively; v) Infrastructure and Dissemination- documents and updates models, local best practices and digital databases that can be applied to design and implement policies, strategies and programs to reduce youth unemployment in Africa; and shares the reports produced and the digital data that is used and created by the project with all stakeholders. The project comprised of a team of experts drawn from universities in Five African countries (University of Lagos Nigeria, University of Ghana, University of Cape Town, South Africa, University of Nairobi Kenya, and The America University in Cairo, Egypt), three universities in the United Kingdom (Lancaster University, University of Strathclyde , Coventry University and University of Derby) and 2 in North America (Carleton University, Canada and University of Iowa, USA) The investment required is 600 thousand pounds. The funds will be invested in capacity building and networking (70%), scoping studies (20%) and administrative support (10%). This project responds to the urgent need for a multi-country strategic approach to address high youth unemployment rates in African countries. The project greatly benefits young career academics in different African countries because it provides a platform for them to build their research capacities in one or more of the nine focus areas of the ARUA, USD-CoE and the resources that can be leveraged to form partnerships and explore entrepreneurial opportunities