Urban Africa: Risk and Capacity (Urban ARC) is a three year programme of research and capacity building that aims to reduce disaster risk in urban sub-Saharan Africa by breaking cycles of risk accumulation. The programme aims to do this by building a community of practice including sub-Saharan, African and international researchers and practitioners that can provide a structured assessment of risk accumulation and reduction dynamics.

The Framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015 set ambitious targets for achieving an expansion of education provision worldwide and enhancing gender equality. The Policy Document Education 2030 sets out the detail on this. Some new indicators to monitor, evaluate and build accountability for this framework have been developed and others are under discussion by a number of technical committees. This project aims to contribute to this work.

Despite infrastructure being the dominant expenditure category of most governments in the developing world (as well of multilateral and bilateral development organisations), we have a very limited understanding of whether and how infrastructure investments affect poverty and development. Two projects focused on India and East Africa will attempt to fill this key gap in our knowledge.

This project will examine the impacts of the AIDS pandemic on the livelihoods of young people in rural Malawi and Lesotho. Several southern African countries with exceptionally high HIV prevalence have also experienced recurrent food crises in recent years – a situation that has been (somewhat controversially) labelled 'New Variant Famine'.