In adolescence, health-related behaviours are adopted that will have substantial positive or negative impacts on the individual's short- and long-term health, educational attainment, and employment prospects. However, in most low-income countries few adolescents have any contact with health services, especially for health promotion and disease prevention, and services are not always appropriate for their needs. Due to resource constraints there is often limited capacity to provide high-quality youth-friendly health services. Technological advances provide opportunities to deliver services and information away from traditional clinical settings, hence reducing barriers such as cost or confidentiality. Adolescents may be particularly receptive to digital platforms that allow them to self-manage their health and well-being. What is A-CHECK? The programme will screen and treat/refer adolescents for common conditions through health check-ups in younger (10-13y) and older (16-19y) adolescents. Adolescents will only be screened for conditions with an accurate and acceptable test and a locally accessible effective intervention e.g. mental health, HIV, vision and hearing, anaemia. What exactly will be done? I will develop, pilot-test, implement and evaluate the innovative A-CHECK programme and an accompanying digital platform in Zimbabwe. Check-up visits will take place at schools for younger and in the community for older adolescents. The platform will reduce the workload of staff by allowing adolescents to self-screen using questionnaires (e.g. mental health, risk behaviours) and pre-existing apps (to test hearing, eyesight, body composition), and will help the team to keep in touch with adolescents and provide information on referral appointments. I will analyse the data collected through the A-CHECK programme to improve its future acceptability and cost-effectiveness. What are the main outcomes? Answers to the following questions - Do adolescents attend the screening and referral appointments? What impact do visits have on their health and education? How much does it cost for an adolescent to be screened and to obtain the recommended care for a condition? Is this a good value for money? What is innovative about this study? The approach is innovative and novel, because, few LMICs currently provide check-up visits for adolescents and in countries where they are provided, the visits don't always meet the needs of adolescents e.g. don't include mental health screening. This proposal takes the innovative and bold step of moving from condition-specific health programmes towards an adolescent-centred approach focusing on what matters most to adolescents. This is the first empirical study to have investigated the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of multi-component adolescent health check-ups. Specific innovations: - Youth Researchers will participate in a human-centred design approach to intervention development - Digital platform on which adolescents will complete some of the health screening activities, saving consultation time and improving the quality and efficiency of data collection - Novel adolescent engagement activities including crowdsourcing contests and a reward system in the digital platform with adolescents gaining points when they complete screening and/or attend referral visits - Machine learning and innovative data analysis to maximise A-CHECK efficiency and engagement by providing targeted messages and services Why Zimbabwe? Zimbabwe is an ideal location for A-CHECK with great potential for scale-up given the close collaboration between BRTI and the Ministries of Health and Education, the emphasis on prevention within the 2018 School Health Policy, and the absence of other good ways to screen and refer adolescents. In other African settings, there is considerable interest in adolescent check-ups and potential for the Zimbabwean model to be adapted elsewhere.

In many parts of Africa, changing patterns of cross-border migration are transforming the importance of borders for marginalised populations. Recent literature cautions that simplified narratives about illegality in border zones are complicating efforts at addressing social inequities. This research examines social and political dimensions of rural livelihoods along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border in conjunction with current debates about transboundary resource management in the region, focusing on perspectives in artisanal gold mining communities in Manica, Mozambique, where Zimbabwean artisanal miners live and work side-by-side with Mozambicans. The study explores what displacement means to different rural actors and how challenges are negotiated in pursuing resource-dependent livelihoods, with the ultimate goal of enhancing policies for addressing livelihood insecurity on both sides of the border. The Zimbabwe-Mozambique border is a high priority for research, as large numbers of Zimbabweans have crossed into Mozambique as Zimbabwe's economic and political crisis deepened and are engaging in artisanal mining. Empirically, the study addresses three interlinked research questions: 1) How does mobility across the border represent new opportunities or, conversely, new challenges, for reconfigured livelihoods in artisanal mining communities near/along the border?; 2) To what extent are global and national institutions taking these challenges and opportunities into consideration in their approach to transboundary resource management policies?; 3) How are formal artisanal miners associations and informal groups of artisanal miners (on both sides of the border) socially engaged in processes of contesting land near/at the border? Through in-depth life history interviews, focus groups, field diaries, visual methods and participant observation with artisanal mining associations, the study will explore how women and men in mining communities negotiate livelihood struggles, analysing social and economic ties that transcend the border. Analysing perspectives on mining, displacement and migration in relation to transboundary resource governance, policy documents will be reviewed and interviews conducted with national and district government authorities, companies and civil society organizations. This study will generate original data and contribute new insights to engage conceptual and policy debates as well as associated methodological and ethical debates in borderlands research. The analysis aims to inform researchers in geography, development studies, African studies and the growing field of borderlands research, as well as policymakers. In 2011, the African Union signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the African Borderlands Research Network, based at the University of Edinburgh, highlighting the need for research to support policymaking that enhances livelihoods in border regions. This project is especially timely in light of a global environmental treaty signed by more than 120 countries recently, including Zimbabwe and Mozambique, requiring governments to take new steps to manage artisanal gold mining. Government officials have expressed the need for research to inform National Action Plans for implementing the treaty in the 2015-2020 period. The project's regional workshops will co-produce knowledge while building local capacity of artisanal mining associations, government agencies, civil society and universities in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and the UK. Theoretical, ethical and methodological insights will be disseminated through books, articles, briefs, lectures and courses, to inform crosscutting debates at the intersection of borderlands research and extractive sector research. Building on past experiences working with United Nations agencies, this project will be transformative in cultivating new skills to lead North-South-South collaborative research that informs policymakers at regional, national and global levels.

35% of Africa, 40% of the sub-Saharan Africa land surface and almost 37% of the member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is underlain by weathered and fractured 'basement complex' bedrock which contains groundwater within its weathered mantle (most significant under the 'African erosion surface') and to a lesser extent within rock fractures (most significant under the 'post-African erosion surface'). Achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa (MDG Target 7.C: to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation) is therefore fundamentally reliant on the long-term sustainability of groundwater abstractions from these crystalline basement complex aquifers (BCAs). The incentive for our proposal is a recent reconnaissance analysis of the sustainability of groundwater resources of the BCAs in Malawi (the 'Malawi analysis' of Robins et al 2013). The reconnaissance method for estimating groundwater resource limitation compares estimates of groundwater throughflow and storage depletion with actual abstractions at a coarse scale (100s km2). The analysis raises concern that groundwater abstractions exceed long-term recharge in 4 of the 15 'water resource areas' (WRAs) of Malawi, in parts of both the 'weathered' and 'fractured' BCA environments. This controversial conclusion contrasts with the long and widely held view that resource development from BCAs is limited by low transmissivity, hence through low yield of wells, compounded by widespread technological failure of the well-points themselves. Also, it provides a cautionary perspective on a continent-wide assessment of groundwater 'volumes in place' in Africa by MacDonald et al (2012) who have estimated the BCA resource at 500,000 m3/km2 on the basis of published geological maps and estimates of hydrogeological parameters. Availability and sustainability of the groundwater resource, however, fundamentally require ground-truth measurements and process-based analyses (Edmunds 2012). Cumulative groundwater abstraction has greatly increased across much of SSA over the past 30+ years following numerous rural water development and drought relief programmes. Therefore the Malawi experience could be indicative of groundwater resources sustainability in BCAs more widely throughout SSA. If the Malawi analysis is correct, one important implication is that additional, un-recoverable well-point failure will be expected in the affected regions. This expectation forms the basis for the test we will apply to the Malawi analysis. This proposal therefore addresses the concern that the Malawi experience is indicative for groundwater in BCAs throughout SSA. The principal objective is to test the Malawi analysis, by examining the implications for well-point failure using independent data on well-point occurrence and status (available through WaterAid and the Malawi Ministry of Water Development and Irrigation). Concurrently, we will explore the links between well-point failure, health, poverty and gender issues where resource limitation to sustainability of groundwater well-points has been proposed, using census and aggregated heath data. We will carry out field investigations to refine the analysis of groundwater resource limitation over a smaller area and to develop a preliminary analysis for a selected region in southern Zimbabwe. We will develop a methodology for application to water-use policy and local resource/well-point monitoring. We will stimulate awareness and adoption of the methodologies at a regional Workshop. Hence we will support national mitigation measures, and local management of groundwater use. The project will lead to new estimates of resource limitation in Zimbabwe, new collaborations, and form the basis for wider investigation of resource-limitation across SSA basement complex regions.

* Context The Earth's vegetation is changing in response to climate change, increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, and harvesting for fuel, food and building materials. These changes can accelerate or reduce climate change by altering the carbon cycle, and also affect the livelihoods of those who use natural resources in their day-to-day lives. One of the most important ways to understand vegetation change and its impacts, is to make careful measurements of the same patches of vegetation ("plots") repeatedly. Networks of these plots have produced surprising findings, challenging theory and models of vegetation responses to climate change. E.g. in Latin America, a network of these plots has shown that tropical forests are not soaking up as much carbon as predicted. Networks of these on-the-ground plot measurements are the only way to get a detailed view of how vegetation is currently changing. However at the moment, different researchers do not combine their data to understand regional patterns of change. This project will address this by bringing together researchers collecting plot data in southern African woodlands to share data and answer the big questions about what is happening to the vegetation in the region. The southern African woodlands are the largest savanna in the world (3 million km2), and support the livelihoods of 160M people. Many of these people are poor and depend upon the woodlands for 25% of their income and to support their agriculture. Theory and models suggest that these woodlands will be sensitive to increased atmospheric CO2 and other environmental changes underway: this is because, unlike forests, woodlands maintain a balance in the competition between trees and grasses, allowing both types of plant to co-exist. Small changes that benefit trees (such as more CO2 in the atmosphere) might rapidly change woodlands into a tree-dominated system. This would mean that they store more carbon, but might reduce the diversity of plants on the ground. It is also possible that human use of these woodlands, particularly wood harvesting for fuel, is altering their diversity and reducing the "services" that they provide. Currently we have no way to know if these changes are happening - satellite data and models can help, but need to be validated with plot measurements. * Aims and objectives Understanding the response of southern African woodlands to global change is the long-term goal of SEOSAW. It will do this by creating a regularly re-measured, systematic plot network. The stepping stones to this network are to: 1) develop an online data-sharing platform to exchange existing plot data so that we can look for signs of widespread change 2) combine NERC-funded data from 486 plots with data from 1,783 plots measured by others, to create a network that covers the whole region 3) use this new data set to better understand the processes that allow trees and grasses to co-exist, to allow modellers to make better predictions of future change 4) encourage researchers to make measurements in similar ways in the future, so that we can more easily detect changes 5) create a plan for future plot measurements that covers the whole region, and makes best use of the available time and money. * Who will benefit? SEOSAW will fill a large gap in the network of plots in tropical regions and benefit: - modellers of the Earth's vegetation will be able to test their models against reality in one of the most difficult to model biomes - scientists using satellite data to map vegetation will now be able to calibrate and validate their maps in all types of tropical vegetation - Those modelling the carbon cycle, who need to know how much carbon is being taken up by the woodlands Conservationists will also benefit, as SEOSAW will identify parts of the region that have unique or particularly diverse woodlands, helping to prioritise conservation efforts.