There are 38 million people with HIV worldwide. Many of these people take lifelong medication that ensures that the virus cannot spread in the body. The virus can, however, hide in the body, and this makes it difficult to find a cure. We need to figure out how to safely ‘wake’ up the virus, while strengthening the immune system so that the virus cannot spread further in the body. In this project, a collaborative team of people with HIV, scientists, medical specialists, and pharmaceutical partners will work together on finding an acceptable HIV cure for everyone, everywhere.

Water, energy and food insecurity and precarity, synthesised as the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus, highlight the need for creative imagining, using a transdisciplinary approach to engage critically with these complex problems. To discover and understand the imaginations and innovations that could steer us to a sustainable future, we propose to work in very local, urban contexts, where WEF challenges reflect the legacies of Apartheid and colonialism. Through community engagement and citizen science labs, we will use a case study of systems thinking in practice to advance socio-political understandings of responses to complex, interconnected but spatially and temporally dispersed problems, and critique discourses of resilience, resourcefulness and sustainability. Citizen Eco-Labs and Art-Labs in Johannesburg (Gauteng), Mankweng (Limpopo), and Alice and East London (Eastern Cape) will enable us to describe community-based understandings of WEF precarity and its particular impact for women and youth. We will generate new knowledge of responses and actions to such precarity, and analyse how ongoing collaborations among community members, local organisations, and multiple public and private partners enable socially inclusive, eco-cultural responses to the environment. We aim to work with local residents and draw on their understandings of the WEF-Nexus, through participatory methods of engagement, to develop guidelines for best practice for partnerships that can contribute to improving livelihoods, the environment and wellbeing.

Water hyacinth, an invasive species in (sub-)tropical inland waterbodies, clogs waterways and intakes and affects aquatic life and human activities, and may facilitate the spread of diseases. On the other hand, water hyacinth can be exploited for biofuel production and other sources of income. A sustainable solution to water hyacinth infestation “uses” WHY instead of only attempting to “lose” them. This project will use scientific research, satellite data, and stakeholder experiences to co-create such solutions for Lake Chivero, the main source of drinking water to Harare, capital of Zimbabwe.

Too many women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) still die as a direct result of pregnancy and childbirth. We know from experiences in high-income countries that the vast majority of these deaths are preventable. Most experts believe that strengthening various aspects of the health system (as conceptualized in the six WHO building blocks, which include the health workforce; health information systems; leadership and governance; and actual service delivery) is the solution. It is still, however, unclear which building blocks are most important, which interventions within the building blocks are best value for money, and how interventions in different building blocks influence one another. Another aspect that is critical for improving maternal health but is insufficiently emphasised in the building blocks is enabling patients to demand good access to high-quality services. We postulate that the key steps needed to improve services in pregnancy include holding maternal health managers accountable for these services and encouraging community participation to thus increase patient demand. Moreover, much more is needed to shore-up the skills of public-sector managers and how they function in teams that work to improve these services. Finally, we hold that services would be improved through better use of information routinely collected by maternal health services, especially learning from instances of maternal death. To test this hypothesis, we will thoroughly review the available knowledge on these topics in the academic literature (for all LMICs) and in the grey literature (for South Africa, Rwanda and three additional, carefully selected African countries). Then, in Rwanda and South Africa, we will document illustrative cases of successes and failures in maternal health services, to identify opportunities to improve the way these services are provided, and to enhance workers motivation and leadership. We will study services for treatment of HIV disease in pregnant women and for providing care during emergencies in pregnancy or childbirth. Through working closely with policy leaders and civil society, throughout the project, we will take joint actions to improve maternal services. Practically, this means that teams of policy makers and researchers in Rwanda and South Africa will apply knowledge learnt in the project and attempt to markedly improve the way maternal services are organised. In both countries, the major reforms underway and the relative inclusiveness of policy processes, mean that presently there are major opportunities to positively influence policy directions and their implementation.

Climate change challenges requires to globally phase out fossil fuels. For fossil fuel rich LMIC this seems to present negative trade-offs with other important national targets: decreasing poverty and inequality and promoting growth, employment and energy access. Nevertheless, various local communities, civil society organizations and scientists in Africa and Latin America, supported by transnational networks, propose Leaving Fossil Fuels Underground (LFFU) in order to simultaneously combat socio-environmental injustice, ecosystem degradation and climate change, and achieve inclusive sustainable development. A few of these innovative LFFU ideas and initiatives have already been successful. Given their potential relevance for realizing SDGs 13, 15 and 16, and given the limited interdisciplinary scholarship on these initiatives, this project analyses, develops and shares successful LFFU arguments and strategies. Their potential for upscaling to other countries as well as the possible trade-offs on SDGs 1, 7, 8 and 10 are integrated in the project design. Through combining governance and rights-based approaches, co-creating new knowledge with various stakeholders, and connecting to and expanding existing networks, this project expects to have a positive impact on the promotion of LFFU in LMIC. The interdisciplinary team will train MSc/MA and PhD students and practitioners in South Africa, Ecuador, the Netherlands and beyond and will produce multiple tangible tools to adequately share research results to local communities, NGOs, policy-makers, social movements and institutional investors in Africa, Latin America and Europe.