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Our researchers regularly meet and interact with policymakers, not only in New York and Geneva at UN level but also in Brussels for EU events. In March 2019, Maria Tomai joined an event on the Circular Economy, where she was able to brief EU policymakers on the work done at UNU-MERIT, particularly t...

In a remote corner of northwest Kenya, 800km from the capital Nairobi, lies a sprawling urban settlement built from tin sheet and tarpaulin provided by various UN agencies. Kakuma, the name shared by a town and one of the largest refugee settlements in Africa, is a remote place in a geographic, mora...

Teaching research methodology to our new PhD fellows is my favourite class. Doing so in small groups, as is often the case in our PhD programmes and professional training, allows me to engage in creative and innovative educational formats. It’s also much appreciated when teaching mid-career pr...

The ‘Strategic Innovation’ pilot programme, which aims to help entrepreneurs make strategic choices and prioritise them — so that they can really start innovating — kicks off this month in Maastricht and surrounding areas. An initiative of the Maastricht-based institute UNU-MERIT, Strate...

This Friday, pupils in countless cities across the world will skip school and march for climate action. In just a few months, the movement has made quite an impact. It now needs policy backup – and action. In a recent tweet, the 16-year-old Swedish youth leader Greta Thunberg gave a list of practica...

Throughout this series we have highlighted the importance of social protection for forced migrants, despite the political and economic effects surrounding its provision. In so doing, we have now built a guidance framework on how to adapt humanitarian relief into social protection, as part of a long-...

My co-author Francesco Loiacono and I won an exploratory grant from Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) last year, and a small grant from the International Growth Centre (IGC) this year. The first allowed us to travel to Uganda and organise focus group discussions with refugees, firms and other sta...

As the world’s largest online and user-generated encyclopaedia, Wikipedia is an education medium used by students across the word. However, as with textbooks and educational materials in any society, Wikipedia suffers from great divisions and has the potential to shape our view of the world. For eve...

One of the most pressing and cross-cutting issues on the international agenda today is global migration – an issue only made more challenging by climate change and armed conflict. Against this backdrop, UNU-MERIT joined a global event designed to train future policymakers how best to tackle the chal...

This study programme is very comprehensive and includes a blend of research tools that are relevant to developing countries and to practical work in the field. The best part, though, is that my studies are clearly connected to research and to strengthening policy and strategies. Another major aspect...

I was born a long while ago on a snowy night in Oslo. This was not the Oslo of now, where a third of the population is either immigrant or born to immigrant parents. This was the Oslo of old, of presumed certainty of place and identity. My parents, both from southern India, had gone to live there th...

Despite the fact that women comprise half the world’s population, gender inequality persists worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Beyond gender-based violence, this inequality manifests in various ways: from unequal control over resources, to unequal distribution of household d...

“The last lesson I learnt is that sustainability is not in the future but in the present. Personal experience taught me that most people want to be reassured that they are going to survive 2019.” Silvio Funtowicz, Philosopher of Science, University of Bergen During the first week of Febr...

Indonesia has long aspired to become an upper-middle income economy and is now seeking ways to kickstart growth. The government is particularly interested in the role of the manufacturing sector and how to diversify and upgrade industry — which, in parallel, means reviewing industrial, fiscal ...

Every year on 11 February, the United Nations, partners worldwide, women and girls mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Why does it matter? Recent studies suggest that 65% of children entering primary school today will have jobs that do not yet exist. While more girls are attend...

Diversity, visibility and impact are three of the biggest buzzwords of the media landscape, especially for the UN family. They feed into various questions, including: Who is shown and who is seen? Who should set the spotlight? What is shared and what is gained? So on and so forth. This post aims to ...

Though most eyes were on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, the UN General Assembly adopted another accord in December 2018: the Global Compact on Refugees. While labelled “a powerful expression of multilateralism in today’s fragmented world” by UN High Commissioner for Refu...

“Europe isn’t rich in natural resources, but we are very rich in human resources, and the circular economy can draw on those and export the technologies they spawn to the rest of the world,” said Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, ...

MAASTRICHT. As of January 2019, researchers [and other staff] from the UNU-MERIT institute pay a flying tax when they book a domestic flight or a flight abroad. The tax is deducted from the project budget. “I was slightly apprehensive for the reactions,” says director Bart Verspagen, “but the plan w...

After over 15 years at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN specialised agency on information and communication technologies (ICTs), I felt it was the right time for me to design and execute a research project combining my professional experience, academic interests and certain gaps...