There has recently been a sharp decline in the incidence of malaria in several parts of Africa, due to the strengthening of control measures, most importantly the large-scale distribution of free and highly subsidized insecticide-treated bednets, raising the prospect that malaria could be eliminated. But despite scaling-up of control, transmission persists in foci which provide a continuing source of infection. Additional strategies are needed to eliminate these foci, this is important because a resurgence of malaria in populations whose acquired immunity has lapsed could have a devastating impact. The aim of this study is to find out whether we can virtually eliminate malaria in a population by delivering intensified control in villages with persistent transmission. The trial, which will take place in central Senegal, will run over two years. Each year we will select villages to be targeted, on the basis of malaria cases reported in the previous year, and we will operate intensified malaria control in these villages, attacking the vector population with indoor residual spraying with a highly effective residual insecticide, and treating infected persons with effective antimalarial drugs to remove the reservoir of infection. The hope is that by targeting the places which favour transmission, there will be reduction in the prevalence of malaria infection not only in areas which are targeted but also in the surrounding villages that are not targeted. Spraying is done just before the rainy season begins, coating the places where the first mosquitoes to emerge will rest, to kill them before they can transmit infection. Chemotherapy will be done once early in September, to clear the reservoir of infection in humans before the height of the transmission season, and again in October to clear any persisting or new infections. We will use a combination of two drugs, an artemisinin to quickly clear malaria infection, and piperaquine, which provides prophylaxis for about a month. Treatment of carriers is known to be an essential component of elimination programmes but it is an open question whether it is better to administer antimalarial drugs to all members of the community or screen and treat only those who are positive. The trial will use both approaches to see which is most effective and practical. It is hoped that the findings of this study will contribute to the elimination of malaria in areas where until recently it was the major cause of child deaths.

By 2050, it is estimated that 85% of the world's French speakers will be based on the African continent (Observatoire de la langue française, 2014). There are expanding francophone African diasporic populations in North America, Europe, and China. With this future-oriented demographic context in mind, the proposed project will investigate popular writing and reading practices in post-independence Senegal, with a particular focus on magazines. The project addresses urgent issues concerning literacy and development, working with the National Women's Museum in Dakar and the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire at the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar to develop professional capacity and promote engagement with historic print initiatives within Senegal through a pilot digitisation project and two related exhibitions (one in Dakar, the other in Bristol). Public engagement work and academic outputs (conferences/publications) will build connections to current creative and pedagogical work around reading. This work engages with research priorities in Modern Languages and the Arts and Humanities more broadly, namely the interpretation and preservation of cultural production in the Global South; changing ideas of the public sphere in an era of transnational mobility; and the materiality of post-independence local and national narratives. From Onitsha market literature in Nigeria to recent online and print channels such as Chimurenga (South Africa) and Kwani? (Kenya), popular print cultures in Africa have to-date been studied in primarily anglophone regions of the continent. This research has highlighted the social worlds of everyday literacies, the emergence of new genres, and the kinds of textual and visual authority wielded by so-called 'popular' print. Recent research on print culture in francophone regions of the continent has focused on inequalities in the global literary marketplace and the production of a francophone literary canon. This project will advance those findings by turning to the broader post-independence print archive found in popular magazines and investigating its significance for current and future ideas about reading, writing, and the materiality of the word in the Global South. The core focus will be on three magazines distributed across francophone Africa and its diaspora: Bingo, La Vie Africaine, and Awa: la revue de la femme noire. These magazines have been overlooked due to difficulty of access, leading to potentially narrow understandings of reading cultures in twentieth and twenty-first-century francophone Africa. They acted as vehicles for cultural translation across regions, between urban and rural milieux, as well as transnationally. They evoked a sense of individual and collective identity, themes of work and leisure, ideas of literature (the founding editors were published poets), political solidarity (whether national, or transnational, especially in the Cold War context), and acted as tools for generating future aspirations. The emergence of female writers and readers through these magazines is particular significant, pointing to active networks of female cultural producers that pre-date the canonical 'first generation' of African women writers. A central research output of the current project will be a co-authored article analysing quantitatively and qualitatively over 2000 readers' letters that appear in these magazines, based on quantitative and qualitative analysis. This work seeks to identify and analyse instances of reading for pleasure, as well as more instrumental reading practices. In their digitised form, these magazines will provide a rich archive of material for historians, political scientists, and social anthropologists working on this region. Using innovative collaboration between the UK, France and Senegal, the project seeks to collate, curate, research, and promote the archive of popular print production in francophone Africa for academic and non-academic audiences.

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.

DNA methylation (DNAm) is an epigenetic mechanism that plays a central role in gene regulation. It helps to define how cells respond to genetic and environmental signals and, ultimately, contributes to whole system health and disease status. Levels of DNAm differ from one person to another. However, it is unclear how much of the variation in DNAm levels is caused by genetic or environmental factors and if such effects also relate to human phenotypes. Understanding the relationships between DNAm, genetics and environment is essential for both understanding pathways of health and disease and disease consequences. Prior research has been limited to populations of European ancestry, restricting understanding of DNAm variation to limited contexts. This is a crucial knowledge gap because there are known genetic and environmental differences in drug response and disease risk factors across population groups worldwide which may be attributable to DNAm variation. Evaluating DNAm variation in diverse population groups allows comparison across varying genetic and environmental exposure profiles. Identification of disease pathways common to all populations will represent mechanisms of health and disease that are common across all humans. This allows identification of drug targets that will be effective in any population group. Identification of disease pathways restricted to specific genetic and/or environmental exposure profile will reflect adaptation to environmental and genetic context. This will allow identification of molecular mechanisms that underpin the disease discordance that we observe across global populations and highlight opportunities for targeted treatments. Our first project aim is to map genetic and environmental determinants of human DNAm variation to understand mechanisms of DNAm variability. We will generate a catalog of genetic associations with DNAm across populations worldwide. This catalog will be used to assess which of the identified genetic associations with DNAm are also associated with human complex traits. This is important because the findings can inform the functional role of phenotype-associated genetic variation, and ultimately - our understanding of the mechanisms underlying human phenotype variation. The second aim of the project is to understand mechanisms of disease and disease discordance observed between population groups for childhood and cardiometabolic disease related phenotypes. This project focusses on childhood and cardiometabolic disease for which there is substantial disease discordance and health disparity across populations. For example, diabetes risk is substantially higher in individuals of South Asian origin even after accounting for known genetic and environmental risk factors. Identification of DNAm variation associated with type 2 diabetes that is context specific will contribute to explaining excess type 2 diabetes risk in the South Asian population group. In doing so, Identification of disease pathways restricted to specific genetic and/or environmental exposure profiles brings the opportunity to target treatment or intervention where it is effective. This research builds a global partnership of teams to bring together genetic and epigenetic data collected from individuals worldwide. A key aspect of this proposal is building equitable partnerships between these teams. This is essential in order to build capacity for research in genetically diverse datasets and to provide internationally relevant research on cardiometabolic and child health phenotypes Identification of common and context specific mechanisms of health and disease mediated by DNAm is of high health impact because it will enable actions to reduce global health disparity and inequity via targeted interventions or treatments.