The project aims at creating an EU-Africa e-Infrastructure, UBORA, for open source co-design of new solutions to face the current and future healthcare challenges of both continents, by exploiting networking, knowledge on rapid prototyping of new ideas and sharing of safety criteria and performance data. The e-infrastructure will foster advances in education and the development of innovative solutions in Biomedical Engineering (BME), both of which are flywheels for European and African economies. It is conceived as a virtual platform for generating, exchanging, improving and implementing creative ideas in BME underpinned by a solid safety assessment framework. Besides the provision of resources with designs, blueprints and support on safety assessment and harmonisation, specific sections for needs identification, project management, repositories and fund raising are also foreseen. UBORA (“excellence” in Swahili) brings together European and African Universities and their associated technological hubs (supporting biomedical prototyping laboratories and incubators), national and international policymakers and committed and credible stakeholders propelled by a series of Summer Schools and Competitions. In a nutshell, UBORA couples the open design philosophy with Europe’s leadership in quality control and safety assurance, guaranteeing better health and new opportunities for growth and innovation.

Groundwater resources in the coastal zone of EA are at risk. Increased demand, linked to rapid population growth in the coastal margins, has led to unsustainable and ill-planned well drilling and abstraction. Sea water intrusion into formerly freshwater aquifers frequently occurs as recharge from rainfall is insufficient to support the rate at which water is extracted. Wells supplying domestic, industrial and agricultural needs have, in many areas, become too saline for use. Climate change is expected to exacerbate this problem. Rising sea levels in the Indian Ocean region are projected to cause inundation of saltwater along the coastal zone, which is dominated by highly-permeable rock, while altered precipitation patterns and temperature change will affect the amount of water replenishing the aquifer through infiltration and recharge. Local communities across the region are already reporting changing tidal and rainfall patterns. The multiplicity of hydrological and demographic driving factors makes this a very challenging issue for management. At present the state of coastal aquifers in the EA region is not well constrained and past practices which may have exacerbated the problem have not been clearly identified. This project will bring together teams from Kenya, Tanzania and the Comoros Islands to address this knowledge gap; collaborating and working towards achieving water security in their respective areas. An integrative approach, combining the expertise of hydrogeologists, hydrologists and social scientists, will target selected sites along the coastal zone in each country. Hydrogeologic observatories will be developed where focussed research will identify the current condition of the coastal aquifers and identify future threats based on projected demographic and climate change scenarios. Water supply and monitoring needs will be identified through consultations with end-users and local authorities and optimum strategies for addressing these sought. An initial step will be to survey and bring together all existing data on well installations, abstraction, groundwater gradients and the salinity of existing wells at each pilot site. Understanding where wells are located, how deep they are, how much water is abstracted, what the flow directions are and what the salinity is, provides an overview of the state of the aquifer. Local data on hydraulic properties, such as the permeability, porosity, and storativity of the aquifer will be investigated and synthesised. Targeted electrical geophysical surveys, which provide relevant spatial information on both the aquifer structure and the saltwater distribution, will be undertaken. Similarly data is needed on the hydrological drivers in the system; to understand how much of annual rainfall infiltrates to replenish groundwater reserves (compared to the amount abstracted for human use) and how this might be impacted by changes in rainfall intensity or frequency. Land use and land use change is also important; controlling the proportion of incident rainfall which reaches the soil and subsequently groundwater. Recharge modelling will be an important tool for investigating different scenarios for climate and land use change and evaluating groundwater vulnerability. The social and political aspects of water use and development will be incorporated to assess the compatibility between the evolution of the availability of coastal freshwater resources and those of society and water politics. Researchers will engage with local community and stakeholder groups in each area and work together towards understanding the issues most affecting the communities with regards accessibility to water supply. A two-way exchange of knowledge between researchers and community members is essential in working towards feasible solutions to existing problems and ensuring preparedness for the changes in demographics and environment in the future.

The AHEAD project is a partnership between 4 HEIs (Romania, Poland, UK, Italy), 1 SME from Bulgaria, 5 HEIs from Kenya, 2 HEIs from Tanzania and 3 HEIs from Uganda. Its overall objective is to enhance the management, governance, teaching, research and evaluation capacities of Partner Country HEIs in view of enabling them to implement the knowledge triangle and better integrate their research, education and innovation functions in support of innovation for sustainable development and inclusive growth.The secific objectives of the project are:- To enable PC HEIs to review and reform their institutional structures and agendas, build the vital human capital and strengthen the managerial expertise needed to lead and manage knowledge flows and innovation partnerships with a variety of stakeholders in the field of sustainable development, entrepreneurship and inclusive growth;- To contribute to the PC HEIs’ knowledge and teaching base in the field of innovation management and inclusive innovation, as well as to build PC HEIs’ capacities for entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship education;- To create inclusive stakeholder-oriented university-led support structures and communication platforms with diverse partners in the innovation system in view of nurturing local entrepreneurship and inclusive development in the participating PCs.The main activities include:-Analysis of national innovation systems and institutional innovation capacities;-Developing learning materials in Innovation Management and Inclusive Innovation-Training of trainers and workshops;-Improving the good-practice and evidence base for delivering (social) entrepreneurship education;-Creation of Virtual Knowledge Gateways (VKGs) for structured cooperation between PC HEIs and key stakeholders and strengthening stakeholder collaboration and consultation;-Establishment of Innovation for Development Hubs (IDHs) encouraging local and regional development and stakeholder co-creation in innovation.

Food security in sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) is under threat, and unless agricultural productivity in the region doubles within the next 2 decades, it will face major consequences in terms of famine and associated problems. Plant-parasitic nematodes (PPN) are microscopic roundworms whose unmanaged presence has a massively deleterious effect on crop productivity. They infect many plants of great economic importance, including maize, potato, soybean and banana, resulting in annual yield losses of billions of USD worldwide. Notably in SSA, a poor understanding and awareness of nematology within higher education has resulted in a lack of trained nematode scientists and professionals, both in non-profit and private sectors. As a consequence, the importance of PPN management remains overlooked, effectively sabotaging potential for improved agricultural productivity. The inclusion of nematology at the initial stages of higher education in Africa is crucial to maximise the number of students exposed to the discipline, resulting in better-prepared, fully-informed BSc and MSc graduates entering the job market. In SSA, increasing the numbers of well-trained nematology students will be vital in addressing the many nematology-related problems in the area, as well as in providing sustainable solutions to food security and environmental health in the region.The main aim of the NEMEDUSSA project is to support this academic transformation via promotion of nematology in selected Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and by transforming these selected HEIs into regional centres of excellence for nematology education. To achieve this overall objective, the aims of NEMEDUSSA are to:• enhance nematology capacity at HEIs by professionalisation of staff and by upgrading facilities;• develop BSc and MSc modules in nematology to be incorporated into existing HEI programmes; • establish a Pan-African Nematology Network; • disseminate awareness aand information to a range of stakeholders.