After three successful Annual Meetings of the ADAPTED consortium in Bochum, The Hague and Paris, Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), Academic Supervisors and African partners came together in Gordon's Bay, South Africa, for the Final Conference from 25 to 28 November, 2024. The fifteen ESRs presented the findings from their PhD research conducted over the course of the last three years. Their individual presentations showcased the remarkable advancements of the research projects and highlighted the pivotal insights gained through these endeavours for the economics, governance and politics of development, particularly in relation to the SDGs' crucial objective of poverty alleviation.
ADAPTED speaker Prof. Löwenstein opened the conference by recalling the beginnings of the project and the remarkable success of receiving funding as one of 11 European Joint Doctorate proposals out of a total of 82 EJD applications and reached the 3rd place in the overall ranking with a score of 98%. Overall, ADAPTED was one of 1,503 eligible MSCA-ITN proposals submitted in 2020, of which only 123 proposals received funding, with only 15 scoring marginally better than ADAPTED.
In the opening keynote address, social protection expert Prof. Stephen Devereux (Institute of Development Studies, IDS), delivered a keynote speech titled “What is Social Protection for?” The keynote addressed the trajectory of social protection following its “invention” by international institutions like the World Bank, UNICEF or the International Labour Organization in the 1990s towards becoming a development priority in Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. Prof. Devereux stated both the developmental potentials of national social protection schemes but also their limits when not linked to other aspects of statal social policy.
During the SDG forum, ESRs presented papers and chapters in parallel workshop sessions. In these workshops, academic supervisors and African partners of the ADAPTED network served as discussants. Grouped along the three central work packages defining the ADAPTED research agenda, the parallel sessions, nevertheless, mirrored ADAPTED’s interdisciplinary nature.
Finally, the last conference day was dedicated to disseminating the research output of the ADAPTED project to to an interested audience beyond the scientific community, for example international organisations, implementing agencies and governmental officials. ESR poster presentations showcased the overall success of the ADAPTED project in providing a comprehensive set of findings that are instrumental to the development community.
Following this highly successful Final Conference, consortium members reaffirmed their commitment to maintaining the existing network among European universities, development practice institutions and African partners and to joining forces again in the near future.