The Hub will reduce disaster risk for the poor in tomorrow's cities. The failure to integrate disaster risk resilience into urban planning and decision-making is a persistent intractable challenge that condemns hundreds of millions of the World's poor to continued cyclical destruction of their lives and livelihoods. It presents a major barrier to the delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals in expanding urban systems. Science and technology can help, but only against complex multi-hazard context of urban life and the social and cultural background to decision-making in developing countries. Science-informed urbanisation, co-produced and properly integrated with decision support for city authorities, offers the possibility of risk-sensitive development for millions of the global poor. This is a major opportunity - some 60% of the area expected to be urban by 2030 is yet to be built. Our aim is to catalyse a transition from crisis management to risk-informed planning in four partner cities and globally through collaborating International governance organisations. The Hub, co-designed with local and international stakeholders from the start, will deliver this agenda through integrated research across four urban systems - Istanbul, Kathmandu, Nairobi and Quito - chosen for their multi-hazard exposure, and variety of urban form, development status and governance. Trusted core partnerships from previous Global Challenge Research Fund, Newton Fund and UK Research Council projects provide solid foundations on which city based research projects have been built around identified, existing, policy interventions to provide research solutions to specific current development problems. We have developed innovative, strategic research and impact funds and capable management processes constantly to monitor progress and to reinforce successful research directions and impact pathways. In each urban system, the Hub will reduce risk for 1-4 million people by (1) Co-producing forensic examinations of risk root causes, drivers of vulnerability and trend analysis of decision-making culture for key, historic multi-hazard events. (2) Combining quantitative, multi-hazard intensity, exposure and vulnerability analysis using advances in earth observation, citizen science, low cost sensors and high-resolution surveys with institutional and power analysis to allow multi-hazard risk assessment to interface with urban planning culture and engineering. (3) Convene diverse stakeholder groups-communities, schools, municipalities private enterprise, national agencies- around new understanding of multi-hazard urban disaster risk stimulating engagement and innovation in making risk-sensitive development choices to help meet the SDGs and Sendai Framework. Impact will occur both within and beyond the life of the Hub and will raise the visibility of cities in global risk analysis and policy making. City Partnerships, integrating city authorities, researchers, community leaders and the private sector, will develop and own initiatives including high-resolution validated models of multi-hazard risk to reflect individual experience and inform urban development planning, tools and methods for monitoring, evaluation and audit of disaster risk, and recommendations for planning policy to mitigate risks in future development. City partnerships will collaborate with national and regional city networks, policy champions and UN agencies using research outputs to structure city and community plans responding to the Sendai Framework and targeted SDG indicators, and build methods and capacity for reporting and wider critique of the SDG and Sendai reporting process. Legacy will be enabled through the ownership of risk assessment and resilience building tools by city and international partners who will identify need, own, modify and deploy tools beyond the life of the Hub.

This application seeks support for two expert meetings and other participatory events for MoHoA partners and affiliates from the Global South to coincide with and enable their attendance at the MoHoA conference titled 'Modern Heritage and the Anthropocene', organised by The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), The School of Architecture at Liverpool University, and the University of Cape Town. The two expert meetings will be held immediately before and after the conference to capitalise on and maximise the opportunities afforded by such an ambitious one-off event. Combined with associated UK site visits and meetings, the expert meetings will provide a unique and timely opportunity to bring together academics, practitioners, and other related professionals and stakeholders from different disciplines to strengthen global research networks engaged with decolonising, decentring, and reframing modern heritage and contribute to the completion of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage. This seminal document will be formally presentation to UNESCO after the conference at the second expert meeting on 29 October 2022. Research networking activities will take place during two one-day expert meetings addressing specific topics related to MoHoA's agenda including the finalisation of the Cape Town Document on Modern Heritage, as well as specific site visits / tours of partner institutions in the UK. This application will allow up to 12 international partners from the Global South to engage meaningfully with a wide range of UK participants, professionals, and organisations, including universities, museums, galleries, National Trust, and Historic England, Scotland and Wales. This process will be documented in an edited open-access book and, together with MoHoA's wider activities, compiled into a series of freely available teaching materials on MoHoA's website. MoHoA's conception coincided with the 20th anniversary of the Modern Heritage Programme, jointly initiated by UNESCO, ICOMOS, and DOCOMOMO in 2001, presenting a timely and important opportunity to reflect on the transformative cultural experiences and global consequences of the recent past that heralded the dawn of the Anthropocene and its impacts on society, culture, climate, and the planet. Since its inception, MoHoA has successfully attracted funding for discrete activities and developed a strong research network that engaged hundreds of participants across four thematic workshops with key partners including the Africa World Heritage Fund (AWHF), UNESCO, ICOMOS, ICCROM, IUCN, the Swahilipot East Africa Heritage Hub and the Getty Conservation Institute. It also hosted an international (online) conference at the University of Cape Town in Sept 2021 with over 50 papers presented. The initial phase of MoHoA was conceived within an African frame for two reasons. Firstly, the continent has been uniquely marginalised by current conceptualisations of 'modern' within heritage discourses. (Africa has just 89 cultural UNESCO World Heritage sites (less than Italy and Spain combined), compared with Europe's 439, and only one of these is exclusively categorised as 'modern heritage' - Asmara: A Modernist African City, the former Italian colonial city and capital of Eritrea). Secondly, Africa will experience the highest rates of urbanisation over the next 30 years. The heritage of our recent past therefore possesses the paradox of being of modernity and yet existentially threatened by its consequences. The diverse issues associated with this paradox, from ecological crisis to structural racism, and their lessons for researching, defining, protecting, and ascribing value to 'the modern', will be the focus of the MoHoA conference at UCL in Oct 2022 and the activities outlined in this application. If successful, this collaboration will make one of the most significant contributions to decentring heritage theory and practice in more than a generation.

There are currently 1031 sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List embracing cultural, natural and mixed categories. While it has long been recognised that sites require protection, conservation and management, they are increasingly implicated in wider programmes of social and economic development. A significant part of this is tourism-related which is widely perceived as a pathway to development particularly within developing countries where heritage and the wider landscape are important, if often fragile resources. Closely linked to this is the wider cultural and creative sector that animates places and supports tourism. The United Nation's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognises the role that the inter-connected sectors of culture, heritage, the creative industries and tourism can play in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals. The focus of this Network is specifically on the role that World Heritage sites can play in sustainable development as high profile actors in both cultural heritage and international tourism. In terms of the sites themselves and associated symbolic, 'brand' value of UNESCO inscription, World Heritage sites offer significant development opportunities for ODA countries. However, there are clearly sensitivities around a more instrumental use of World Heritage that has long been immersed in the discourse of protection and preservation rather than as a lever for social, environmental and economic improvement within the context of sustainable development. Furthermore, there remains limited understanding of the ways in which World Heritage can actualise sustainable development through engagement with local communities and the embedded knowledge and creativity they hold. This role of the community is recognised by UNESCO but mechanisms for harnessing this are not well developed. While clearly recognising the over-arching need to protect and maintain World Heritage, there is a need to re-imagine and re-structure the way that it is used; not simply as interesting and attractive places to visit but as highly visible and influential resources that can be used to achieve the SDGs. Through a series of workshops, including those held in ODA countries, this project establishes and builds a Network of experienced and new researchers, policy makers and local stakeholders to share research, new ideas and examples of good practice relating to the ways in which World Heritage can be effectively and sensitively mobilised for sustainable development. Each workshop will focus on a World Heritage site and will act as a research activity and an opportunity to debate questions of practice and policy around concepts such as developing and managing sustainable tourism, working with the wider cultural and creative sectors and site management and governance. It will seek to better understand the conditions of working with World Heritage and the barriers to sustainable utilisation of the sites. The Network will recognise the multi/interdisciplinary nature of its objectives and its core partners and will seek to learn from the communities and stakeholders it engages with. In working with UNESCO's World Heritage Centre and specifically the sustainable tourism programme the Network will endeavour to shape policy and strategy and to disseminate its outputs and working methods beyond its immediate partners so as to engage with the other World Heritage sites in ODA countries.

The social and economic disadvantage faced by Indigenous groups represents a significant global policy challenge. The world's 310 million Indigenous peoples, who largely live in Official Development Assistance (ODA) countries, face a poverty rate that is estimated to be twice that of the non-Indigenous population, as well as poorer health and education outcomes, and a lack of recognition of their rights. In terms of addressing this policy challenge, many countries have developed pioneering social policies in health, welfare, employment, and more recently in higher education. Little is known about how innovations in higher education policy, including diversified forms of higher education provision, are affecting the social and economic development of Indigenous peoples, including the relative benefit of policies that seek to assimilate (by programmes of affirmative action) or separate Indigenous youth (into universities designed specifically for them). Underlying policy development, we can identify two competing discourses, a collectivising one on Indigenous knowledge and identities, and an individualising one of skills development and labour market entry. These both represent distinct values, politics, and methods, as well as real tensions in the needs of Indigenous peoples. This project stands at the conjunction of these discourses and will seek to critically question how different types of university impact on Indigenous groups both socially and instrumentally, through focussing on the Mexican case. Mexico represents the ideal internationally relevant case study given its pioneering role developing new kinds of university provision designed specifically for Indigenous groups ('intercultural universities'). We examine how the type of university attended impacts on Indigenous student experiences, skills/knowledge acquired, and identifications across different social domains. The proposal has been developed in partnership with the Mexican Ministry of Education, Indigenous community development NGOs, UNESCO, and the Mexican National Association for Universities and Higher Education. The proposal brings together an international team of researchers in the field of Indigeneity from Universidad Veracruz with sociologists of education from UNAM (Mexico City) and University of Bath. In order to generate knowledge about the effect of attending different types of university, qualitative research will be carried out across 3 purposefully selected universities representing diversity of institutional type within Mexican higher education. Participant observation will be conducted within each institution, which will enable the identification of 60 Indigenous students to be tracked longitudinally over a 3-year period, following them as they progress through university and beyond. Taking this longitudinal approach, careful attention will be paid to continuity and change, as well as important differences based on university attended, in terms of their experiences, encounters, skills/knowledge acquired and aspirations for the future. To provide a more complete picture, perspectives will also be gained about the impact of university attended from 3 members of their social network situated across the social domains of their Indigenous 'community', peer-group and post-university destination (e.g. workplace). Working with Indigenous community development groups, and project partner in the Mexican Ministry of Education, as well as other influential partners in the fields of policy and practice, sustainable recommendations for policy and practice will be developed. The work is relevant to other developing country contexts facing similar challenges, and the potential for impact across these other countries will be maximised through our partnership with UNESCO.

The 2017 Lancet Series, Advancing Early Childhood Development: From Science to Scale, estimated that 43% of children under 5 years in LMICs (250m children), were at risk of not reaching their potential because they had stunted linear growth or lived in extreme poverty. The proportion of children at risk increases appreciably when additional risk factors are considered, especially low maternal schooling and child maltreatment. Living in poor and unstimulating conditions affects young children's learning and development. Children exposed to poverty and adversity explore and learn less than children not exposed to these stresses; they learn less at school and achieve fewer school grades; earn less as adults; have more social problems, and poorer physical and mental health. We will study barriers and accelerators to learning in LMIC ECE programmes, at home and in communities, as well as associations between early learning and indicators of child development and school performance. We will estimate their longer-term effects on education and earnings in adulthood. We will use descriptive and statistical analyses of secondary data collected through representative country surveys and research studies. As an established group of multi-disciplinary and multi-country experts and collaborators, we build on prior success in sourcing and analysing data from 91 LMICs by including early education and expanding to 137 countries. Global data, presented along the continuum of the early years, breaks down the false dichotomy between ECD and ECE, between care and education, and between learning at home and in formal programmes, and supports multi-sectoral actions along different stages of the life-course. We will expand our global analyses of threats to ECD by examining gender, location and wealth, services and family supports for young children, and policies that create facilitating environments for families and children. We will, for the first time, link indicators of the structural quality of ECE (eg teacher-child ratios) to contexts and child outcomes in LMICs. Process quality (eg teacher- and caregiver-child interactions), on which there is as yet no global data, will be studied through case studies in 5 countries, one in each of five regions of the world. We will source data on government, development assistance and household expenditures on pre-primary education; extract further country micro-data on contexts in which young children develop and learn; update nationally representative data on young children, services and policies to the most recent survey dates available, and develop new composite indicators of barriers and accelerators of young children's learning and development. Through partnerships with regional networks of ECD-ECE government and stakeholder teams, the project will help to build research capacity in ECD-ECE, and increase the use of data for decision-making, action and monitoring in 20 countries. We will use the results to provide evidence-based support to engage international human rights law, especially the right to education and the rights of the child, in advancing progress towards achieving the SDG goals of universal access by 2030. This research will address the gap in the evidence base for a unified approach to ECD and ECE. The findings will support the development of the right to education by providing a holistic approach to guide early development and educational interventions. It will demonstrate the strength of interdisciplinary work in cross-fertilizing data analysis and legal research in building strong foundations for translation into policy and regulatory change. Given the evidence on the critical roles of ECD-ECE on learning and wellbeing in the short, medium and longer term, the project has important implications for development and welfare in countries on the DAC list. This large-scale global approach is critical to support and guide policy and investments.