The project aims at achieving the following specific objectives:
- Research: Establish pilot research on key resource supply challenges in urban and semi- urban African areas with participation of relevant stakeholders from the public sector, industry and civil society
- Training: Provide targeted research trainings for university staff, young researchers and administrations, as well as practitioners dealing with urban planning
- Higher Education: Develop and share of case-study based online educational resources to be used by all partners on sustainable urban management
- Network: Create sustainable institutional relationships among participating higher education universities as well as personal ties among a community of experts in the area of natural resources management in African cities.
Alongside the project-related objectives, the initiated collaboration is expected to generate different synergies and mutual benefits by linking, extending and intensifying unique networks of partners, sharing experiences in teaching and research. Through creating a beneficial partnership, the project team will contribute to the research and capacity development of the partner institutes in Tlemcen and Niamey and enhancing cooperation between the networks of PAU/PAUWES and WASCAL. This way, the project will foster experience exchange, learning and technology transfer/exchange between Germany and African partners and within the African continent.
In the initial project phase, research strategies and current curricula of project partners will be reviewed in order to identify actions fields for contents harmonization, priority settings and synergies between planned activities.
Such strategic work will be useful for a more targeted research work in case studies in the research modules.
In the second phase of project implementation, participating researchers will be involved in developing selected online-based learning units to be used in current and future curricula of Master and Ph.D. programs of participating institutes.
At the same time, the researchers will benefit from specialized trainings offered through the capacity-building module together with practitioners from administrations in charge of urban planning and representatives from civil society.
Research enables a closer link of the trainings to reality and will improve the options for implementation and the outreach of the project.
Finally, during the last project phase of consolidation, the future research topics and 6 promising innovative methods will be outlined for future cooperation projects.
At the same time, the developed educational materials together with the support of young researchers like PhDs and master students will help to achieve the project sustainability by increasing its outreach and cooperation network.