ADAPTED Innovative Training Network Meeting – February 2022
ADAPTED Innovative Training Network Meeting – February 2022
The ADAPTED ITN is a consortium of five European universities, six African universities, four non-academic development practice partners. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 956909.
The main aim is delivering training to fifteen Early-Stage Researchers with relevance in poverty eradication and sustainable development goals. Specifically, the areas of training include validating pathways towards poverty eradication, analyzing interactions between poverty reduction as well as other policy areas and optimizing the impact of poverty reduction policies.
Boğaziçi University is one of the European universities in the ITN. Valentine Nandako Masika works on the political ecology of development projects in Kenya and Ghana under the supervision of Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu from the Political Science and International Relations at Boğaziçi University.
First Annual Meeting of the ADAPTED Innovative Training Network
The first annual meeting of the ADAPTED ITN was held at the Ruhr University Bochum which is the coordinating institution of the ADAPTED ITN. It was the first time that 15 Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs) met physically with co-supervisors and supervisors from other universities.
The meeting was kicked off by a welcome and introduction speech by Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Löwenstein from the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy at Ruhr-University Bochum. This was followed by a two-day SDG forum where ESRs introduced themselves, presented their research questions and explained how they derived these questions.
After their presentations, the ESRs got useful feedback and questions from their supervisors as well as participants and co-supervisors from collaborating universities in Europe and partner universities in Africa. During coffee breaks of the SDG forum, the ESRs got the chance to network with the academic supervisors but also with actors from non-academic development practice partners of the ADAPTED ITN.
The mid-term meeting was held on the third day of the meeting and involved short presentations of the ESRs about their role within the ADAPTED ITN comprising of their research questions, planned secondments and trainings they had undergone.
On the fourth day there was two research training sessions for the ESRs delivered by Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Löwenstein and Prof. Dr. Wil Hout on political dimensions of governance in ADAPTED’s research agenda and relevance of growth theory dealing with poverty elasticity of growth. The session by Prof. Dr. Wil Hout shed light on power relations in the development agenda while the one by Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Löwenstein challenged the existing models of poverty eradication in development, with a critique that they do not contribute to reduction of income inequality.
ESRs had a career workshop on transferrable skills by career coaches where they learned about behavioral motives and favorable occupational conditions for these motives.
Aside from the presentations and training sessions, the evenings involved enjoyable dinners which provided opportunities for good conversations and networking amongst ESRs and the supervisors.
