Many have argued that the shared history of the Mediterranean ended as the Great Powers withdrew from the area after the First and the Second World Wars. As the European colonial powers were expelled from eastern and southern coasts they reorganized themselves in the European Community and carried on with new northwesterly and transatlantic trajectories. Yet, the influence of the two Superpowers, the US and the USSR stepped into the Mediterranean as powerful opposing forces in the bipolar Cold War.

Team

Mariko Sato, Leyla Dakhli, Houda ben Hamouda.

The overall objective of the project is to strengthen the human and infrastructure capacity of EIT to create and distribute electronic learning resources and services that are pedagogically sound and locally relevant, so that the EIT can take an active and informed role in the use of ICTs to address the Eritrean development and education priorities.

Team

(UEF) Andrés Moreno, Ilkka Jormanainen, Roman Bednarik, Jarkko Suhonen, Erkki Sutinen, Juha Eskelinen (Aalto) Jyri Hämäläinen, Edward Mutafungwa (EIT) Samuel Tewelde, Teklay Tesfazghi, Khalid Idris

The partner organisations bring together their expertise in research and development of new educational methods and tools at university level in the field of sustainability and development education and training. The goal of the cooperation is to combine the technical and pedagogical elements of existing simulation and game tools to a massive multiplayer online simulation for sustainability education. This is pursued by forming a network willing to participate in the forming of a massive multiplayer simulation for sustainability education in Southern Africa.

Team

Johanna Ollila, Roderick Fox, Sophie Oldfield, Johanna Kärki

In this research project, I examine and analyse globalised health care policies and the related infrastructures in the Kilimanjaro region in Tanzania. I will provide a holistic portrayal of a health system and the peoples it serves by exploring the vicissitudes of sickness and health and the plurality of therapeutic trajectories. The project produces new knowledge about the state of public and private health care systems and infrastructures under free-market conditions by using a local-scale approach to examine a global issue. Additionally, the project will contribute to a broader understanding of health-seeking behaviours by using ethnographic methods to analyse social dynamics of health care in the community and within health care systems. The project has an explicit aim of producing information that will have direct uses in improving health care systems and infrastructure in the developing world.

Team

There is an increasing surge in the conflict between farmers and carnivores in Namibia (as well as in many other areas). Namibian farmers are living on the edge between making economic profit or suffering losses from their activities every year. Loss of livestock predated by carnivores (such as lions, leopards, jackals) may significantly negatively affect the unstable economic balance of farmers at the end of the year. As a response, farmers have started to apply an easy-to-implement, yet illegal, solution consisting in the administration of poisons to predated livestock carcasses. Such practice not only kills carnivores, as in the farmers wish, but has repercussions on the entire ecosystem, with vulture species seemingly the most negatively, yet indirectly, affected. This project will use an interdisciplinary approach to understand the factors that most importantly affect the use of poison by farmers in Namibia. It will also allow to quantify and map the use of poison across the country. The map will pinpoint the major hotspots of poison use where conservation efforts should be focused in order to resolve the conflict between farmers and wildlife.

Team

Peter Bridgeford, Holger Kolberg