With a focus on five Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), ORCA is a pilot programme dealing with science performance and science management with a specific focus on economics and social sciences. Across the world, the academic ranking business has turned into a multi-million industry with dozens of surveys implemented to rank universities, bringing with it pressure to improve performance on these same rankings. As a result, most universities have been attempting to improve their performance measured against the metrics and criteria used. While debates advance within the EU and high-performing countries, training paths to increased research performance remain limitedly available. Central Asia is a good starting point to address this gap, given the excellent tradition it has in hard sciences (especially engineering) that has resulted in continued international collaborations, while research in the economic and social sciences has remained largely under-developed. ORCA will produce a generation of experts in research policy with focus on the region as a pilot attempt to a) contribute to informing EU (and member state) policies and attitudes towards the region, and how to enhance excellent and open science, and b) act as multipliers and contribute to the formation of further specialists that will then be able to explore and operate in other regions. ORCA brings together 18 leading institutions and organisations across Eurasia, with experience on science excellence and sufficient links with national governments to influence the development of science in the region, including policies on ethics, integrity, open access and data management. The effects of ORCA will live on through the formation of a dense network based on secondments and knowledge exchange, building a vibrant community of researchers interested in enhancing collaboration, knowledge exchange, co-authorship, seminars, presentations and future projects.

A recent ILO report estimates that two billion workers are active in the informal economy. The relevance of the phenomenon is even higher if the secondary effects of informal employment are considered and is likely to get worse, given that climate change has come to increasingly affect those living in conditions of vulnerability, pushing more people into the informal sector. Although informal economic activity is widely present in Europe and North America, constituting around 20% of the national GDP, developing and emerging economies suffer disproportionately from this phenomenon. For example, the ILO estimates that Africa, Asia and Latin America host 93% of the world’s informal employment and have been on the rise due to the Covid-19 crisis. Altogether, the World Bank and ILO estimate that almost a billion people entered precarious work because of the pandemic, with women and young people being the most affected categories. PRELAB network includes academic and development organisations, all with a major focus on informality and development, to: 1) Train researchers in methodologies to measure informality in a global perspective; 2) Conceptualise ways to apply qualitative and quantitative methodologies that were successfully used Eastern Europe and Central Asia to our target countries in the Asia Pacific region; 3) Produce a consistent narrative on how to measure and tackle informality in emerging economies; and 4) Engage with policymakers and business actors, in addition to the scientific community, to identify ways to apply these approaches into development practice worldwide.

Across the globe, widespread research continues to reaffirm that women face inferior income opportunities when compared with men. Women are less likely to work for income or to actively seek work; they have fewer opportunities for business expansion or career progression; they are disproportionately more likely to be homemakers yet household labour is not remunerated nor considered to be ‘work’. Women make up around half of the economically active population, however they are underrepresented in various fields, including entrepreneurship. According to World Bank data, in 2022 the global labour force participation rate for women was just over 50% compared to 80% for men. Globally, female labour force participation has not increased greatly over the last three decades and male/female disparities remain stark especially across large swathes of Asia. This is despite the fact that Asia is widely regarded as the engine for global economic growth. International organisations estimate that if women had equal representation in all labour markets, GDP could increase to approximately $136 trillion by 2025. At the same time female entrepreneurship and indicators for gender equality appear to go hand-in-hand, making both key factors for a country's economic development. With a total of 20 partners (10 from Europe and 10 from Asia, including 8 non-academic partners) FEMENA draws on world-class expertise to design an inter-disciplinary, international and inter-sectoral research and training programme that addresses the central questions of how female entrepreneurship is framed, fostered, and promoted across Asia. Four phases of secondments will develop an integrated methodological framework based on Amartya Sen's capability approach to explore how individuals, across a range of contexts and operating in difference sectors, assess their opportunities and abilities rather than applying categories that risk being too context-specific or that ignore path dependency effects.