ADAPTED

Dr. Gabriele Bäcker gives us a thorough overview on the new EU-funded European Joint Doctorate programme (ADAPTED)

ERADICATING POVERTY:
PATHWAYS TOWARDS ACHIEVING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

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.

In our previous newsletter (December 2020), we proudly announced that the IEE (as coordinator) and its European partners had been awarded a grant for implementing the new European Joint Doctorate Programme, ADAPTED from 2021 - 2024. At the time of this announcement, ADAPTED was not more than a sophisticated project written on paper and the previous months have kept us busy with preparing for take-off.
 

The ADAPTED research focus

The goal of ADAPTED is to train researchers towards a better understanding of poverty. Since 1990, there have been considerable efforts to reduce absolute poverty in most developing countries. However, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, progress has been slow. Literature shows that the academic debate on the determinants of poverty reduction takes place in disciplinary silos, where approaches that work well for high-income economies, but ignore structural differences between high-income and developing countries, are applied and deliver ambiguous results. The EU-funded ADAPTED project will address this apparent research gap by developing high-level training for early-stage researchers (ESRs), aiming to avoid the existing silos, integrate developing country realities into poverty reduction approaches, and bridge the attested knowledge gaps. The project will validate pathways towards poverty eradication, analyse interactions between poverty reduction and other policy areas, and contribute to optimise the impact of poverty reduction policies.

Within its defined area of research, ADAPTED complements high-level research training of ESRs with excellent transferable skills training, supporting the dissemination of innovative theoretical and methodological approaches and fostering communication with the wider public.
 

ADAPTED partners

ADAPTED is a consortium of European Universities, important internationally active European development organisations and think tanks, and six African partner universities. Within ADAPTED:

• the European universities – including Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany (coordinator); Erasmus University Rotterdam and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands; Boğaziçi University, Turkey; and Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in partnership with Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France – will host the ESRs, direct their research, organise training, and implement the European Joint Doctorate based on project-specific binational agreements (cotutelles de these)
• the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), the Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungs GmbH (DEG) and the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) will host selected ESRs during non-academic secondments and add to the intersectoral relevance of the research done within the consortium while the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI) provides ESRs with advice and training on the dissemination of research output and acts as a global dissemination platform for the ESRs
• researchers from six cooperating African partner universities: University of the Western Cape and University of Cape Town (South Africa), Bahir Dar University (Ethiopia), University of Development Studies (Ghana), Moi University (Kenya), and University of Douala (Cameroon), will supervise ESRs during field work, provide them with access to local actors and data sets, and link them to the non-academic sector in the countries of research.
   

Recruitment of ESRs

To breathe life into the project, an important step was the organization and implementation of the recruitment process for 15 ESR positions, showcased below.
 

Differently to typical doctoral programmes, ADAPTED doctoral candidates will not be financed by a scholarship but will have the opportunity to work on an employment contract for the period of three years, starting in September 2021. After several partner meetings, the related recruiting process started with the call for applications for 15 Early Stage Researcher positions, which was published at the end of December 2020. Up to the application deadline on 31 March 2021, ADAPTED received an incredible number of 287 applications for the 15 positions to be filled. In terms of the composition of the group of applicants, 58 % were male and 42% female. Regarding regional origin, the Sub-Saharan Africa region dominated with 55% of applicants, followed by Europe (20%), and Asia (14%). Applicants from Latin America and North Africa/the Middle East made 4% of the whole group, while 1% was from North America. Overall, applications form 68 countries reached the ADAPTED consortium with Ghana, Kenya, and Germany being the top 3 in terms of numbers of applications.

All applications were pre-screened at the IEE, and around 50% were admitted to the next round, following the general EU eligibility rules and the ADAPTED selection criteria: demonstrating an interest in interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral research, having a specific interest in the ADAPTED research areas, holding a Master’s degree from a recognized university with an excellent result in Economics, Social or Political Science, Law or related relevant disciplines, and an appropriate English language proficiency.

In a next step, the research directors of each ESR project, always consisting of a dyad of researchers from two ADAPTED beneficiary universities, assessed the quality of the literature reviews submitted by applicants as a part of their application package. Having completed that, we ended up with around 60 very interesting candidates who made it to the next step of the selection process. This consisted of online interviews with research directors of the projects and an IEE representative, and took place over two weeks in May. Having talked to many very promising candidates, it was not easy to figure out who the lucky 15 should be, to be nominated for the vacant positions. But finally, we made it and we are convinced that we ended up with a very interesting group of researchers. We are really looking forward to working with them during the coming years.

The selected group is made up of 4 male and 11 female ESRs coming from 14 different countries (Brazil, Egypt, Germany, Ghana, Hungary, India, Italy, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, The Netherlands, Pakistan, Spain, and Uganda) with Kenya being the only country represented by two ESRs.

For the nominated candidates, the recruitment process at the respective home university will now be finalized. All candidates will additionally be registered in the cooperating PhD programmes of their home and partner universities. Both institutions will award a joint degree after successful completion of the PhD project.

In the forthcoming newsletters, we will introduce the ADAPTED members and their projects in more detail and will report on network-wide events.
 

Upcoming Activities

One major remaining activity of the current year will be a first annual meeting with the ADAPTED research directors and ESRs. The meeting will be held in autumn this year, after the ESRs have commenced their work. We strongly hope for the possibility to organize an onsite meeting on that occasion. You can stay up to date on upcoming ADAPTED events on the project’s website (www.adapted-eu.org). This website has been available since the beginning of the year, but first only served the purpose of facilitating the recruitment process. An updated version with more information about ADAPTED’s aims, structure, activities and – most importantly – members, will go online during summer.

Dr. Gabriele Bäcker
Executive Director