July 2017- June 2018

SIID News and Update 2018The Sheffield Institute for International Development (SIID) facilitates, strengthens, amplifies, diversifies and concentrates International Development research across the University. We (SIID) have had another eventful year and I (Dan Brockington, SIID’s Director) made the mistake of trying to democratise this year’s newsletter and asked the fellowship for contributions to the content. This resulted in too much to include - a beautiful cornucopia of events, happenings, hardwork, meetings and exchanges. What follows are just some of the high-lights; apologies to all whose work did not make it into this edition.

Concentrated highlights for busy peopleIt is difficult to parse the material below, so rather than summarise, please look out for the following themes and events that I have highlighted in bold. Our work hinges on the quality of the international partnerships that sustain SIID - read more throughout the research themes. We organized exciting events - read more about the film series; WHO event and diversity of special lectures and seminars and annual PGR conference. We communicated International Development research at the University to broader audiences (with 7k hits on the blog this

year). SIID fellows won prestigious scholarly funds – read more in research funding - and engaged in practical applications of their work with partner organisations – read more throughout the pages below. We have had a series of new post-doctoral appointments with more to come in the near future and Dorothea Kleine has taken up the role of SIID Deputy-Director. As part of our strategic development, we have focussed particular energy (and will continue to do so) on the decolonisation agenda as it pertains to our teaching, research and partnerships.

SIID News and Update 2018

EventsAmong the special events were the SIID annual lecture given by DfID Chief Scientist Charlotte Watts, a special lecture from Sir Peter Gluckman, CSA to the New Zealand Prime Minister on evidence and the SDGs, a workshop with four speakers on ‘Power to the Powerless’, an invited talk by Philippe Stoll, Head of Communication Policy and Support at the, International Committee of the Red Cross (organised by Dmitry Chernobrov), an art exhibition in the Winter Gardens [1] for the Festival of Social Science, Sarah Bracking’s keynote speech at the 9th PGR conference, and Dan Brockington’s inaugural lecture.

SIID has also been getting out and about with strong representation of SIID fellows at key events including the Association of American Geographers in April 2018, the Political Ecology Network in Oslo and the Development Studies Association [3] both in June 2018. Our website stats show continued growth. Hits reached 50k in 2017 with particular strengths in our fellowship (up 395% 2015-17), events (up 216%), research (up 204%) and the blog (up 192%). We launched our podcast series and the blog pipeline has been continually healthy, with something new coming out every week or 3 days for the last few months. The blogs received nearly 7k hits in 2017.

We welcomed students working on all aspect of International Development to the University at a major event in October and from that evolved two highly motivated committees who organised the

Dorothea Kleine and Sammia Poveda hosted a symposium of the RGS Digital Geographies Working Group [2], themed “Justice and the Digital”, in July, which attracted participants from 22 Universities and NGOs. We had seminars to hear cutting edge research from visiting speakers on digital development, block chain, neoliberal conservation in Europe and diverse urban issues. In January 2018 we had another well attended away day that initiated SIID’s engagement in the decolonisation agenda, stimulated by Jaime Echávarri’s work on different development studies centres. For more on this, see our next job advertisement.

As ever, our continual triumph is the numerous reading group meetings, which form the bread and butter of the day-to-day research communities that constitute SIID. We were particularly excited when the newly inaugurated SIID engineers joined the community with a regular series of meetings and readings and plans for a launch in the autumn.

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Photo credit: Gemma Pearson

2Photo credit: @ShadyEuroFreak

SIID News and Update 2018

9th Annual PGR conference over two thoroughly stimulating days in May 2018 with over 30 presenters, and a highly successful simulation of the WHO [4] (also in May). With respect to the latter co-organiser Julie Balen writes that this was:

‘the first ever Sheffield World Health Assembly simulation - and only the 2nd ever to have been held in the UK! It was a HUGE success, with 100% of delegates stating that they would recommend it to their peers in the post-event evaluation! One student travelled from as far as South Korea, just to attend this event (and she is now considering studying at Sheffield!) - others came from across Europe and the UK, including the Geneva Institute of Global Health.’

The impact of the event on people’s understandings of the WHO was rather impressive (the x-axes show increasing understanding).

SIID post-docs Sammia Poveda and Andrea Jimenez have been busy. Andrea was an invited keynote speaker at The African Network For Economics Of Learning, Innovation And Competence Building Systems panel on gender and innovation at the African Innovation Summit in Kigali, Rwanda in June this year. This went so well that she has now been invited to speak at another panel at the Globelics conference in Accra, Ghana, on October 2018. With

funding from the United Nations University, Sammia Poveda has been working with a social enterprise in the Philippines that seeks to combat the impacts of sex trafficking by hiring survivors of trafficking, as well as Gender Based Violence survivors and other vulnerable groups [5]. She is exploring the impacts of the training the company provides on the work and personal lives of the employees.

Sammia’s work also signals that SIID fellows’ engagement with diverse practitioner partnerships is growing. SIID hosted an open public event in November 2017 that heard findings from three projects that explore public perceptions of development in the UK with a follow-up event co-hosted in Manchester in May 2018. Both entailed strong representation from development NGOs from across the UK. Afua Twum Danso-Imoh and Dan Brockington completed a report in conjunction with the NGO Hope and Homes for Children on the relationship between poverty and institutionalised child care. We were pleased also to welcome, with the SSPIKE team, Ellen Wratten’s (DfID’s Deputy-Director of Digital, Innovation and Emerging Policy) visit to the University. Finally Anna McCord has produced two new reports this year which have particular relevance to policy makers. The first explores how to enhance social protection provision

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SIID News and Update 2018

to promote sustainable employment outcomes. The second co-authored by Ed Heinemann and Lauren Phillips, and prepared for IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development), proposes an innovative methodology for assessing the policy impact of Donor Agency interventions.

Research FundingSIID fellows have been involved in a number of research funding successes. Internal competitions saw small projects funded for Paula Meth, Dan Brockington, Adeniyi Asiyanbi, Anna Krzywoszynska, Miguel Kanai, Jackie Harrison and China Mills for projects ranging from Global Mental Health, to digital participation to soil conservation from Brazil to Nigeria to South Africa. A larger project lead by Frances Cleaver, Charis Enns, Brock Bersaglio and Vanessa Speight is working on development corridors in East Africa.

Simon Rushton won funding from the Newton foundation for work on participatory video and post-conflict peacebuilding in Colombia. Rosaleen Duffy, Dan Brockington and Frances Cleaver were successful in two different bids to the Belmont-Norface ‘Transitions to Sustainability’ call. Dorothea Kleine won ESRC funding as a key Co-I in a larger consortium for work on sustainable consumption trends in Brazil, China and South Africa. Paul Mosely is working on a project that examines music and social inclusion in the Global North and South with partners in Europe, Africa and Latin America, to be launched at a conference at the Free University of Bolzano (Italy) in November 2018. Vanessa Speight has won Newton Fund Industrial Academic Partnership funding with Stellenbosch University and GLS Engineers, South Africa, ‘Investigating potable water distribution networks and consumer demand for systems subjected to low pressures and intermittent supply’. She has also co-developed a webinar series on Non-Revenue Water jointly with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor.

SIID fellows are involved in 6 different large GCRF ‘Hub’ bids, that are all through to the second round in the latest highly competitive GCRF call (awards of £15-£20m per Hub) on topics ranging from urban water provision; afforestation; digital inequalities; to diets and human development and insect-based protein. Dan Brockington and Dorothea Kleine have been engaged heavily the development of a University strategy for the GCRF (that will release over £1.5m per year of development research funds to the University). They have also been working on ethical guidelines for overseas partnerships.

All of this also means that the SIID research community is growing. We welcomed Sammia Poveda, Andrea Jimenez (both SIID post-docs working on digital development), Marina Requena (a visiting post-doctoral fellow), Rosemary Pritchard (working on remote sensing and food security) and Sarita Panday and Jiban Karki (working on participatory video in Nepal [6]). Two post-docs joined the BIOSEC team - Jared Margulies and Francis Masse and two more SIID post-docs will be advertised imminently. We said good bye to Caroline Howe (who moved to a post in ICL), Simin Fadaee (to Manchester), Jaime Echavarri (to Italy), Olivia Howland (to Kenya) and Esther Marijnen (to Belgium).

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Research Projects andProgrammesSIID seed corn funding has supported a series of different research projects and meetings across the spectrum of the fellowships’ interests. Summaries of the projects we have funded, and which are now taking on a life of their own, and others which we are proud to be associated with, are available on our website. In the material which follows I have described the new developments that are emerging across different research themes.

Rural Livelihoods and Natural ResourcesSIID fellows Charis Enns, Brock Bersaglio, Frances Cleaver and Vanessa Speight with partners in Kenya and Tanzania (the Indigenous Movement for Peace Advancement and Conflict Transformation and Tanzania Natural Resource Forum) held a meeting to report on findings of research on development corridors in East Africa funded by the UONGOZI Institute and UoS. This drew over 40 attendees from Kenya and Tanzania that included representatives from local civil society groups, human and indigenous rights organisations, environmental NGOs, county governments, academic institutions (Kenya, UK, Canada), and news outlets in Kenya [7].

SIID News and Update 2018

Dan Brockington held a final stakeholder meeting in Dar es Salaam with colleagues from the University of Dar es Salaam and African Mandela African Institute for Science and Technology to communicate the findings of three research projects funded by the ESRC-DfID on different aspects of rural livelihood change in Tanzania [8]. He and Dorothea Kleine have started work on ‘Africultures’ a new EU funded project with partners in 8 African countries on remote sensing and food security.

UrbanPaula Meth, Tom Goodfellow, Zhengli Huang, Tatenda Mukwedeya, Jen Houghton and Divine Asafo (all UoS) alongside partners in SA and Ethiopia have completed the data collection for the large ESRC Living the Peripheries project. Glyn Williams and Paula Meth were awarded HEFCE money through SIID to run a pilot project titled Mobility in the Peripheries. This is running jointly with colleagues in Ahmedebad, Chennai and Johannesburg with data collection and analysis undertaken in May/June 2018. All these projects are meeting in August to analyse data and discuss findings which will be presented at the Royal Geographical Society conference in late August.

Vanesa Castán Broto’s collaborations with the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo and the British Academy have lead one conference on energy access in Mozambique (held in Maputo in May) and another on service provision and energy access in urban Africa (held in Sheffield in June) which coincided with the visit of Dr Domingos Augusto Macucule, who is the Director of the Center of Housing Studies (Centro de Estudos de Desenvolvimento do Habitat), in Eduardo Mondlane University.

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Adeniyi Asiyanbi held a Sheffield funded researcher-practitioner workshop on REDD+ impacts, imperatives and governance on 21-22 February 2018 winning funding to bring over colleagues from several institutions in West Africa and elsewhere. He also spoke on climate change and forests at the 2nd African Climate Talks hosted by United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Addis Ababa, 22-23 March 2018.

BIOSEC (led by Rosaleen Duffy) hosted a Conservation in Conflict and Militarised Areas workshop in Nov 2017, led by Esther Marijnen (then Sheffield), Bram Buscher and Lotje de Vries (both Wageningen) and has been developing critical debates on militarisation of conservation - with articles published in The Conversation, Mongabay and Green European Journal, as well as holding a Knowledge Exchange workshop and seminar at Fauna & Flora International, Cambridge Conservation Institute - June 2018.

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Governance and AdvocacyPauline Dibben and colleagues are continuing to be successful in sharing their ‘SCA-Emp Diagnostic Toolkit’ with companies in UK, South Africa, Brazil and Ethiopia. The toolkit encourages companies to self-evaluate how they are managing their own employment, accounting and supply chain practices and to check the practices of their suppliers. Testimonials show that the toolkit is helping companies to achieve ethical supply chains while also increasing productivity and profits. The toolkit is freely available via the SCA-Emp website.

Emma Heywood is conducting an impact assessment of radio on women’s empowerment in Niger [9]. The project has already had a direct impact on the lives of women in one of the most deprived areas of the

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SIID News and Update 2018

capital, Niamey; listening groups are regularly held at many radio stations to promote awareness of important subjects raised in the broadcasts, such as health, politics, education. Yet many women are not permitted by their husbands or fathers to attend these listening groups because of the very fact that they are mixed. On Emma’s recommendation, women-only listening groups have now been set up at one radio station and will be rolled out to others enabling women to gain vital information to the benefit of their families.

under siege, where at times there seems to be no foreseeable future. PILI (Dir. Leanne Welham)[11] a feature length drama set in rural Tanzania that is based on the stories of real women living with HIV/AIDS in the coastal region of Tanzania but uses real people rather than trained actors and real locations such as HIV/AIDS clinics in which to stage the drama. The Life Equation (Dir. Rob Tinworth)[12] which is about global health in an era of Big Data. It asks what if there were an algorithm for saving the most lives and asks who, and what, gets lost in the number crunching? Each of the three films was accompanied by a talk from a guest speaker and followed by a moderated discussion. Admission was free, with voluntary donations collected for a related charity at each screening. Thanks to Alex Cann from Students for Global Health and Simon Rushton for arranging all of this.

Karim Hadjri ran the ODESSA project end of award conference ‘Towards integrated and affordable health and social care at home for older people’. ODESSA (Optimising care delivery models to support ageing-in-place) is a three-year, €1 million venture which aims to find new and innovative ways of adapting a person’s home so that they can live independently for longer.

Data and Digital InnovationMany members of the theme are involved in the GCRF Strategic Network on Digital Development (PI Dorothea Kleine, with Jaime Echavarri, Miguel Kanai, Dan Brockington, Dan Hammett, Chris Foster, Andrea Jimenez, Sammia Poveda). The network unites 26 researchers from 13 countries in uniquely diverse groups, each led by co-convenor pairs from the global South and North [13]. In 18 months, they have developed ambitious joint research agendas, 5 grant proposals and 4 papers in topics such as Big Data, small data and Data Science for the SDGs; Inclusive innovation and value-based design; Social media and UN peace-keeping; and participatory digital

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HealthIn conjunction with The Film Unit and Students for Global Health, SIID held the inaugural Sheffield Global Health Film Series in April and May 2018. This saw the screening of Ambulance (Dir. Mohamed Jabaly)[10]. A raw, first-person account of the last war in Gaza in the summer of 2014 in which Mohamed Jabaly, a young man from Gaza City, joins an ambulance crew as war approaches, looking for his place in a country

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SIID News and Update 2018

tools to support minorities, including LGBT groups. The network held its second workshop, this time in Sheffield, in March 2018, where grant proposals were presented and peer-mentored.

The DDI theme was instrumental in co-founding the ICT4DNorth network of ICT4D researchers at universities in the North of England and hosted the 2nd annual ICT4DNorth Meeting [14], with 52 attendees. Running this back-to-back with the GCRF DigDev workshop in March allowed us to invite many Southern

researchers as speakers, with a particularly successful opening panel, moderated by Pamela Abbott, with four researchers from/based in the global South critiquing current geographical patterns of academic knowledge creation and highlighting alternatives.

Other events included an ECR panel event on ‘How to get Published’, organised by Eva Hilberg, a Research Roundtable for theme members to share their work in progress and a Triple-Bill event showcasing the work of three post-docs: Andrea Jimenez, Sammia Poveda and Jaime Echavarri. Pamela Abbott is working with colleagues at the West and Central African Research and Education Networks organisation (WACREN) on improving the capabilities of information professionals in higher education institutions in Africa. Chris Foster and Jaime Echávarri have been collaborating with Shamel Azmeh (Bath) on Digital latecomer economies and the digital trade agenda, exploring the diminishing bargaining position of emerging economies as binding rules about digital trade and data are enshrined in international trade agreements. This work was presented at the African Union summit in Addis Abeba and the UN e-commerce week in Geneva.

THANK YOUAnd as ever all of this would be completely impossible without the tireless support of Lucy Dunning, Alastair McCloskey, Sarah Hare, Katie Pruszynski, John Flint, James Wilsdon, Rob Collins, Craig Watkins and the entire SSPIKE team. Special thanks to Amy Carter for supporting the art exhibition.

To find out more about SIID and get involved get in touch with Dan Brockington by email: d.brockington@sheffield.ac.uk

Graphic Design: Sammia Poveda

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