After three successful Annual Meetings of the ADAPTED consortium in Bochum, The Hague and Paris, Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), Academic Supervisors and African partners came together in Gordon's Bay, South Africa, for the Final Conference from 25 to 28 November, 2024. The fifteen ESRs presented the findings from their PhD research conducted over the course of the last three years. Their individual presentations showcased the remarkable advancements of the research projects and highlighted the pivotal insights gained through these endeavours for the economics, governance and politics of development, particularly in relation to the SDGs' crucial objective of poverty alleviation.
ADAPTED is the acronym for the European Joint Doctorate “Eradicating Extreme Poverty: Pathways Towards Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals”, that is funded by the EU under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie action and coordinated by the IEE. Implementation has taken place at five European partner universities: Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne (CNRS), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA), the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS) and Boğaziçi University, Istanbul (BOUN).
ADAPTED speaker Prof. Löwenstein opened the conference by recalling the beginnings of the project and the remarkable success of receiving funding as one of 11 proposals out of a total of 82 EJD applications and reached the 3rd place in the overall ranking with a score of 98%. Overall, ADAPTED was one of 1,503 eligible MSCA-ITN proposals submitted in 2020, of which only 123 proposals received funding, with only 15 scoring marginally better than ADAPTED. In a subsequent keynote address, social protection expert Prof. Stephen Devereux (Institute of Development Studies, IDS), addressed both the developmental potentials of national social protection schemes but also their limits.
During the SDG forum, ESRs presented papers and chapters in parallel workshop sessions. In these workshops, academic supervisors and African partners of the ADAPTED network served as discussants. Grouped along the three central work packages defining the ADAPTED research agenda, the parallel sessions, nevertheless, mirrored ADAPTED’s interdisciplinary nature.
Finally, the last conference day was dedicated to disseminating the research output of the ADAPTED project to to an interested audience beyond the scientific community, for example international organisations, implementing agencies and governmental officials.
You can find more information about the ADAPTED Final Conference in South Africa as well as the award of an Honorary Doctorate to ADAPTED consortium member Prof. Wil Hout in the upcoming December Edition of the IEE Newsletter.