News

Today nearly half of all migrants are women – women migrating not just as partners and dependents but also as independent agents in search of work and opportunities. Yet, once they arrive, they are often marginalised and prevented from enjoying their rights....

Brexit will hurt both the Brits and the Continental Europeans, no matter how the negotiations unfold. Some of the divorce pains will be in terms of cold hard cash. But the worst damage could come from Brexit undercutting the very soul of the EU – i.e., the gradual increase in understanding each othe...

A PhD can be a game-changer for your career, especially at a research institute or international organisation. But not for everyone. Paul Caldron, one of our recent GPAC2 graduates, is a medical doctor approaching the end of his career – and in many ways he valued personal over professional developm...

My father’s great grandparents had come from Indonesia and my mother’s great grandfather had come from mainland China in search of a better life. I therefore also wondered whether I had a future in Iloilo City in the Philippines or if I would also need to become a migrant in order to have a better f...

Taking a stand for evidence-based approaches, we delivered a course on Science Reporting at the City of Knowledge in Panama, 12-16 December 2016. The workshop title, ‘Reach & Turn’, referred to reaching out, turning heads, and shifting mindsets – in many ways the core of communications....

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is taking place in Davos, Switzerland, and the issues being discussed include education, gender and work. A world away, the work of PhD Fellow Brenda Yamba considers child carers and high school attendance in Southern Africa — particularly how they manage, despit...

Maastricht University (UM) has risen to 4th place in the 2016 Times Higher Education (THE) ‘150 Under 50’ ranking for the best young universities in the world. Having held 6th place for the last three years, UM said it was “proud to have its continued efforts, for example toward in...

‘Public Policy & Governance Beyond Borders’ is the guiding theme of this year’s Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) international conference, to be held in Brussels on 13-14 July 2017. We are now delighted to announce that MGSoG/UNU-MERIT (Maastricht U...

PhD fellow Gloria Bernal, from our GPAC2 cohort 2017, has won a scholarship from the Netherlands Fellowship Programme (NFP). One of only two beneficiaries from Maastricht University in the 2016 round, she currently works as a teacher at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. ̷...

Shyama V. Ramani, Professor of Development Economics at UNU-MERIT, has been working on the issue of sanitation since the tsunami of December 2004. It all started as a charity project to build toilets for women in a small coastal village in Tamil Nadu, her home state in the southernmost part of India...

A joint post by Prof. Wim Naudé and Dr. Paula Nagler. — Society has perhaps never been more unequal than at present, in terms of the distribution of income and wealth. Within-country income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) is, according to the UN Development Programme, “more un...

In December 2016, the University of Khartoum in Sudan, East Africa, approved the promotion of Dr. Samia Satti Osman Mohamed Nour to the status of full Professor of Economics. Prior to this, she gained a PhD in Economics from Maastricht University in 2005 and remains an Affiliated Researcher at UNU-M...

Takahiro Utsumi is one of our many students who also works for another UN organisation — in this case the World Food Programme (WFP) in Khartoum, Sudan. He came to Maastricht for our unique course on Evidence-Based Policy Research Methods (EPRM), to improve his everyday work and long-term career as ...

‘Savages, monkeys … go back to the jungle!’ was the ghastly woven prose splashed across my door, the day after I arrived in Belgium. It was 23 August 2002. I was living with my cousin in the heart of the Molenbeek district, now sadly famous for other reasons. ...

A joint post by Dr. Katie Kuschminder, EUI / UNU-MERIT and Prof. Khalid Koser, UNU-MERIT. — The European Commission has decided to start returning migrants from other European countries back to Greece, lifting a ban on the practice that was put in place in 2011. The decision is influenced by c...

Many countries with large reserves of natural resources have failed to achieve higher living standards – countries like Brazil, Chile, South Africa and Peru. Can too much of a good thing be somehow ‘bad’ for the wealth and welfare of countries? The debate has raged on for decades. On the one hand, t...

On 14 December 2016, UNU HQ in Tokyo hosted ‘Paradoxes in Higher Education‘, a conversation with Professor Luc Soete, Chairman of the EU Research, Innovation, and Science Policy Experts High Level Group and former Director of UNU-MERIT. Investments in education are essential for the sust...

A joint post by Shivani Achrekar and Dr. Mindel van de Laar. In e-learning courses, fully online or blended, the biggest challenge for course providers is to ensure retention, allowing participants to finish their online course. While sign-up rates can look promising, drop-out rates are often high, ...

I identify strongly as a migration researcher. So I sometimes feel inadequate next to all my colleagues who can brandish intriguing migration histories from their own lives. My story seems parochial by comparison: I was born and raised in Oslo, Norway, and so were both my parents. I still call Oslo ...

Gender is often seen as an isolated one-dimensional issue, rather than for what it is – a multilayered concept touching all of society, including research and policy. Why are we highlighting this today? Because 25th November is the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Violence ag...