Resources

In 2018, the City of Cape Town declared a city-wide water crisis, which would be punctuated by ‘Day Zero’ – the day the city would run out of water. The drought had been looming for years, and the City of Cape Town had made some management changes, but all rested on the assumption that rain would fall at the same rate as in the past.

Meet Krishnanunni Mavinkal Ravindran from India and Megan Roux from South Africa

When Asaf Adebua in 2017 started to study for his PhD at Gulu University 'The Contributions of Institutions of Higher Learning to Post-war Community Transformation: The Case of Gulu University in Gulu District', he was investigating the relevance of his university to the community it targets to transform, going by the university’s motto, For Community Transformation.

Geoffrey Tabo Olok in 2016 enrolled at Aalborg University to study e-learning for his PhD. Olok and his supervisors now have their eyes on an ambitious plan to establish a centre of excellence in ICT research and learning not only for Gulu University but also to improve Africa’s relevance in that area.

On a cloudy October Friday at Gulu University, a few dozens of Masters students from the Faculty of Business and Development Studies fill up a little shelter set up by the Building Stronger Universities (BSU) project for workshops and conferences. One group after another, from within themselves, they step forward to present their research works to a makeshift team of internal and external examiners. The audience includes their peers, their supervisors, and professors Inger Lassen and Iben Jensen from Aalborg University in Denmark.

There are many opportunities for European and non-European students to travel around in Europe and in the world to meet other students and different realities. DDRN university intern, Dori Zantedeschi, joined the ELLS conference 2019 for life science students in Uppsala, Sweden, Here she introduces the conference and interviews three non-European students. 

During the ELLS Student Conference 2019, in Uppsala, I had the opportunity to attend Musa Bishir’s presentation about his Ph.D. research project on microbial fuel cells. After his presentation, I asked him if he was available to have a talk about his background and interests. We sat in the library in the Ultuna campus of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), which hosted ELLS 2019.

In November 2019, Dori Zantedeschi was attending the ELLS Student Conference 2019, in Uppsala at Ultuna campus of the Swedish Agricultural University (SLU). Along with listening to students’ presentations, I was catching up with some friends that are part of the same double degree program as mine called Environmental Science in Europe (EnvEuro), but that I don’t have the opportunity to see often, since we study in different universities. For the last two years, the ELLS conference has been a fixed appointment for meeting each other.

In November 2019, I was In Uppsala for the ELLS Student Conference (see article), organized by Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Ultuna campus. On the second and last day of the conference, I went to Danilo Crispim Massuela’s poster presentation. I like poster presentation, because the atmosphere is more familiar since you stand all around the poster and the presenter.

Governments, civil society actors such as large businesses, development consultancies and universities all have adopted the SDG framework and state that all future work will be carried out with them in mind. But what exactly are the SDGs? and are there any gaps in the SDG framework which hinders progress?