The AfriConEu project envisions to essentially strengthen and reinforce the digital innovation ecosystems in Africa by targeting existing Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) and supporting them through capacity building and networking activities. African DIHs are playing a central role in the development of digital entrepreneurship and by raising their capacities to tackle the challenges they face they will be more effective in driving digital innovation forward. To achieve its mission, the AfriConEu project will connect DIHs from Nigeria, Uganda and Tanzania with DIHs from Europe with the aim to (i) facilitate knowledge and experience sharing, (ii) drive the development of mutually beneficial partnerships and (iii) support the creation of collective projects for boosting digital economy, empowering youth and fostering innovation and growth. To realize its mission the project will develop, test and validate the “AfriConEu Networking Academy” an innovative mechanism for connecting and sharing best practices, experiences and resources between DIHs in Africa and between DIHs in Africa and EU, in a comprehensive, replicable and self-sustaining way. Through two flagships programmes, the AfriConEu Networking Academy will empower and enable African DIHs to best serve their local industry, boost their start-up ecosystem and empower the youth population with the necessary skills to thrive in a digitalized world.

To understand and mitigate economic inequalities, both locally and globally, we need to acknowledge inequalities within households. Yet, in most empirical studies, such intra-household inequalities are disregarded mainly because we lack appropriate measurement tools and data. Not only is this problematic for inequality measurement, this lack of understanding hampers the design of cost-effective poverty reduction and child development policies. This project has five general objectives. First, I will update the facts about inequalities through direct measurement of intra-household consumption allocations, and relate these to spousal income contributions. Second, I will develop and validate novel measures of parental resource-allocation preferences and use these to study whether children are likely to benefit more if mothers, rather than fathers, receive cash transfers. Third, I will develop and validate novel measures of household decision-making and use these to investigate how targeted transfers shape women’s empowerment. Fourth, I will study whether cash transfers or an educational parenting program is most cost-efficient for child development. Fifth, I will use an integrated framework and the new tools and data, to refine our understanding of the mechanisms behind inequalities among adults and child development. Concretely, the project will contribute to our knowledge in the following specific ways. I will carry out an extensive data collection on intra-household allocations, parental-allocation preferences and women’s empowerment, in ten very diverse countries, one from each decile of the world income distribution. I will engage in a local RCT in Tanzania on cash transfers and parenting, which also involves extensive data collection on household consumption, time use, preferences and decision-making. Finally, I will conduct lab experiments in Chile, India and Tanzania so as to validate the parental-allocation preference and decision- making measures.

Why RER-CTO?: The conduct of clinical trials requires competent ethics committee and regulatory authorities that can review clinical trial applications and monitor processes independently and efficiently ensuring the safety of clinical trial participants, and the integrity and reliability of the generated data. The capacity of most African regulatory authorities regarding clinical trial review and oversight is weak due to poor infrastructure, limited resources both human and financial, lack of expertise, un-conducive working framework and lack of systems adequately supported by technology. Collaboration between academia, international organizations, National ethics committees (NECs) and national regulatory authorities (NRAs) are mandatory to produce sustainable regulatory skills and functional clinical trial oversight systems. The RER-CTO consortium consists of a group of well reputable clinical trial researchers, regulatory authorities, ethics committees, universities and research institutes in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Norway, and Sweden. Our aim is to achieve ethics and regulatory excellence and harmonization in sub-Saharan Africa in clinical trial oversight (CTO) by improving the legal and policy framework by identifying gaps and making recommendations, improving regulatory and research ethics oversight capacity and capability by digitalising the clinical trial oversight systems and developing training programs to strengthen competency of relevant stakeholders, and strengthening local, regional, and international collaborations and coordination of NECs and NRAs for clinical trial oversight by developing joint clinical trial review guidelines. These efforts are geared towards increasing clinical trials in sub-Saharan Africa, standardization of clinical trial review and monitoring processes, and promoting ownership, efficiency, linkages for data sharing, transparency, and accountability of clinical trial review processes.