Many low and middle income countries (LMICs), including Tanzania, have been implementing decentralisation since 1990s as a process to strengthen health systems and its performance through improved efficiency, quality of services and a means of promoting democracy and accountability. While decentralisation is widely practiced in LMICs empirical studies have predominantly focused on understanding the extent of the decision-making authority provided by the central government to the authorities at the lower levels. A few studies which have examined the actual use of decision-making space have focused on the influence of decentralisation on one or few health systems functional areas rather than addressing multiple functional areas. Other studies have only been conducted in a few districts making it difficult to explore how the exercise of the decision space vary across the districts and the factors that account for the variations. Additionally, studies examining the evidence for the effectiveness of decentralisation on improving health system performance are scarce and results are mixed. Building on earlier studies, we aim to better understand how and if decentralized local authorities use decentralisation opportunities for improving health systems performance. Specific objectives are to: (i) analyse the decision-making authorities transferred from the central government to institutions at the periphery in the decentralised health system in Tanzania; (ii) assess the actual decision-making space exercised by local government officials and district health managers within the decentralised health system; (iii) assess performance of the decentralised district health systems; (iv) investigate effects of the decision-making space on health systems performance in Tanzania; (v) engage decision makers at the national and district levels aiming at informing policy and improving the practice of decision space within the decentralized health systems The proposed study will be carried out in 20 selected districts in Tanzania over a three-year period. The project will adopt a multiple-case study design and apply a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) approach. Purposive sampling technique will be used to select 10 best performing and 10 worse performing districts. The performance will be based on the 2018 Star Rating assessment conducted by the Ministry of Health in Tanzania.

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The election of Donald Trump and Brexit signal a demand among voters in the North Atlantic for the reversal of three decades of economic, cultural and political integration. Discontent with globalisation is fuelled by the deeply-rooted popular narrative that the "new international division of labour" - as outlined by Folker Fröbel and colleagues in 1980 - has resulted in the offshoring of well-paying factory jobs from the industrial heartlands of the OECD to developing countries. This research project seeks to enrich our understanding of the economic and urban geography of contemporary globalization by troubling this narrative of the rise of BRICS and other 'emerging' countries at the expense of jobs and industry in the global North. It will document deindustrialisation in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, and inform a nuanced understanding of the new international geography of deindustrialisation. The 'alter-globalization' movement reached its zenith at the 'battle of Seattle' at the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. The movement's participants were diverse, but one common refrain was that in a liberalised global economy producers in developing countries would struggle to compete against lead-firms in the OECD. However, a consequence of trade liberalization that activists failed to anticipate was the rapid expansion of South-South trade. A 2015 report published by UNCTAD entitled 'Global Value Chains and South-South Trade' shows that from 1990-2010 South-South trade increased ~15% annually and the majority of intra-South trade originates in East Asia. As a result of exposure to competition from East Asia, local industry in many cities in South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America has been in severe decline (Rodrik 2016). Economist Dani Rodrik terms deindustrialisation in developing countries 'premature' because in contrast to the pattern observed in the OECD, it has taken place prior to a shift from manufacturing to service-sector led growth, and he shows it has been more severe than deindustrialisation in advanced-industrialised countries such as the US and UK. This proposed research is the first comparative research project on deindustrialisation in the global South situated at the urban scale. It will focus on three cities where deindustrialisation has manifest itself differently - Kanpur, India; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Buenos Aires, Argentina - and it will focus on three themes in each city. 1. Urban/regional planning and development - This will focus on the ways in which policy makers problematised deindustrialisation, and whether/how they sought to address it. In some cases they may have tried to protect domestic industry/labourers, while in other cases they may have simply sought to mitigate its impacts. This will be informed by policy documents and interviews with past and present government officials. 2. Business strategy, industrial policy and innovation - Strategies that allowed certain industries/firms to remain operational in each city will be identified. Possibilities include reducing labour costs, investing in technology and enhancing productivity, entering a joint venture with a more powerful firm, and/or subcontracting to informal sector producers. It will also evaluate whether policies that sought to assist domestic firms were successful. This will be informed by interviews with representatives of companies and industry groups. 3. Social welfare - This segment of the research determines the impact of deindustrialisation on labourers and documents their responses. It focuses on the ways labourers have adapted to changing labour markets (eg retraining or shifting to informal-sector activity), and it pays particular attention to the ways women and men have been affected differently (eg women's participation in the informal economy may have increased as the factory jobs available to men have disappeared).

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.

This collaboratively conceived project will establish the Disability and Inclusion in Africa network. Working across disciplines, the project will engage Arts and Humanities research to enhance disability inclusion in international development. Discourses of disability are often created by medical professionals, social scientists or development agencies, and most often in the global north, quite removed from the realities experienced on the ground. This project focuses on the central theme of 'alternative explanations' for disability in African contexts to invite discussion of a range of beliefs and attitudes towards disability, which may include assumptions and misconceptions, traditional beliefs, religious beliefs, medical determinism, supernatural or witchcraft-related beliefs. By increasing awareness of the impact of these alternative explanations, the network will contribute to understandings of the ways in which approaches to inclusion in international development programmes and strategies can be enhanced. Building on new and existing partnerships, the Disability and Inclusion in Africa network will forge international dialogue between researchers and stakeholders at a series of events and exhibitions in Nigeria, Cameroon, Tanzania, South Africa and the UK. The project not only responds to gaps in scholarship, but the culturally-informed research that will emerge from the project aims to bring about a step-change in the way in which disability studies is approached within and beyond Africa, and in the way in which disability is understood by stakeholders in communities, civil society and international development.