News

A unique partnership between the United Nations University and Maastricht University in the south of the Netherlands, our Master in Public Policy and Human Development features seven specialisations. See our new video interviews for the inside track on all the above. ...

Walking 4 SDGs UNU-MERIT staff and students travel virtually to Instituto Terra, Brazil, in support of SDG13 Enter keywords...

European member state security forces, supported by the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, known as Frontex, have pushed back around 40,000 refugees attempting to cross national borders during the pandemic, according to an investigation based on UN reports and records kept by NGOs. These action...

“The Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is however to change it” reads the tombstone of Karl Marx in London quoting one of his works. Of course, this applies not only to the worldly philosophers but to economists as well. And in homage to his call, most of our ar...

There is no doubt that COVID-19 has significantly impacted our lives, including schools and education. Temporary closures of school buildings have highlighted how factors outside school systems affect schools’ capacity to meet students’ needs and support academic achievement. For example, elementary...

The World Bank launched its Development Impact blog on 1 April 2011, and has since published exactly 1500 posts. To celebrate turning 10, the editors of the blog decided to replace its meteor logo with something that better captures the aim of development research: i.e. to inform on the range of pot...

Lynn Mytelka, who passed away on 17 February 2021 at the age of 78 following a chronic illness, was director of UNU-INTECH – today UNU-MERIT – from 2000 to 2004. Lynn had the difficult task of following in the footsteps of Charles Cooper, the founding director, but nonetheless brought to the institu...

The current pandemic, the climate crisis and concerns over new technologies like Artificial Intelligence demand an open and clear dialogue between science and society. As we move forward to address these types of challenges, facts and scientific research need to feed community knowledge and play an ...

This series tracks news and views from our ‘Evidence-Based Policy Research Methods’ (EPRM) course. Many participants work at the highest of levels, both nationally and internationally, including for other sections of the UN system. In normal times, they come to the City of Maastricht in the Netherla...

Franziska Gassmann hails from Switzerland but has lived in the Netherlands for thirty years and is allowed to vote in both countries. She enjoys the Dutch political debates, but is mystified by the Participation Act or the Dutch version of referendums, among other things. “In Switzerland, referendum...

In late 2020, the International Monetary Fund launched a Youth Fellowship Contest to give aspiring young leaders a chance to share their views on COVID-19 responses and global efforts to build back better – towards a greener, fairer and more inclusive recovery. Out of around 700 submissions from aro...

Thinking ahead to International Women’s Day on Monday I recalled two pivotal resolutions the United Nations General Assembly had adopted within a week of each other in 1972, one (27/2951) on December 11 establishing the United Nations University and the other (27/3010), on December 18, proclaiming 1...

A post by Diana Owuor, a student on our MSc. in Public Policy and Human Development (MPP). … In the ‘New Thinking for a New World’ podcast series by the Tällberg Foundation, Alan Stoga rightly states that one characteristic of the global response to COVID-19 is that it has not been global. A f...

He is a free spirit. “As a child I was always wandering around outside, building huts, counting stars.” He is self-deprecating: “I was interviewed for my PhD by a committee of old white men, a bit like myself now,” but also self-aware: “I consciously moved away from fundamental mathematics after my ...

In the 1970s, international organisations began to implement short-term diaspora return programmes to formalise and promote diaspora knowledge transfer for development. The first of these programmes was the Transfer of Knowledge through Expatriate Nationals (TOKTEN), established by the United Nation...

The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the global economy, with world output contracting at 3.5% in 2020, and no recovery likely before the fourth quarter of 2021. Similar to other developing regions, sub-Saharan Africa recorded a 2.6% decline, following strong growth of 3.2% in 2019. Unfortunat...

Big data is on the rise and governments have fallen behind in setting global standards on its collection, storage and usage. Instead, governments are playing catch-up with harnessing the technology that controls data. This was the backdrop to a Chatham House webinar held on 15 February 2021, where s...

Women researchers have been at the forefront of the fight against COVID-19, with female scientists across the globe playing pivotal roles, from advancing knowledge on the virus, to developing vaccines, treating patients and assessing the pandemic’s devastating economic and social impact. However, th...

Affiliated researcher and PhD alumnus Dr Carlos Cadena Gaitán has been named one of the ‘21 Heroes of 2021’ by the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, a global forum co-sponsored by UN-Habitat. Early in the pandemic, while working as Transport Secretary of Medellín in Colombia, Carlos took a l...

This year’s International Education Day, 24 January, occurs in the wake of a global pandemic that closed schools and universities worldwide, affecting 1.6 billion students in almost 200 countries — including some 120 Master’s students at UNU-MERIT in the Netherlands. Against this d...