Scientific publications under the spotlight for LIRA2030 meeting in Addis Ababa

Between 17 and 19 February 2020 35 early-career researchers carrying out projects under the Leading Integrated Research for Agenda 2030 in Africa (LIRA 2030) programme met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for a meeting generously hosted by the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. They were joined by members of the programme’s Scientific Advisory Committee and other leading scholars and practitioners on urban and transdisciplinary research.

Over the first two days, the researchers took part in a training on scientific writing to increase publication success. The training was delivered by INASP and covered topics such as navigating the international research and publishing landscape, identifying suitable journals for a research paper, tips for writing, dealing with peer review, and raising the visibility of publications.

The Forum also provided an opportunity for researchers funded through the LIRA2030 programme in 2017, 2018 and 2019 to learn about urban development in Ethiopia and explore new collaborations across the projects.

Photos from the event are available here.

Later this year, the LIRA programme will support up to nine new collaborations from within the existing funded projects. They will be supported with up to 20,000 Euros each in order to stimulate learning across African cities in dealing with sustainability challenges. We are looking for collaborative projects that contribute to the following themes:

• Exploring ways of scaling up the societal, ecological or intellectual benefits of the LIRA2030 projects;
• Enhancing science-policy-society interactions for improved uptake of project findings (learning from experience of science-policy interactions, identifying systemic obstacles and so on);
• Assessing projects’ contribution to the implementation of global agendas (e.g. the 2030 Agenda, the New Urban Agenda, the Sendai Framework, and the Paris Agreement on Climate change) at the city level, and the role of knowledge co-production in it;
• Assessing capacities of African cities required for implementation of the SDGs and identifying systemic obstacles and opportunities;
• Evaluating the role of academic institutions in driving sustainable development across African cities and identifying changes required within academic systems;
• Learning from transdisciplinary (TD) approaches applied across projects and deepening practices and theorizations on TD research;
• Assessing of the adequacy of institutional capacities (e.g. of city authorities, universities) for practising and participating in TD research.

Find out more about the LIRA 2030 programme.