From 1 to 4 April 2025, representatives from the ENLIGHT universities of Bern, Galway, Ghent, Göttingen, and Groningen took part in the IPORA event held in Bordeaux, France.
IPORA is an international transdisciplinary research network, funded in 2023, between four main universities: Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Addis-Adeba (Ethiopia), Bordeaux (France) and Rabat (Morocco).
Its ambition: to create a long lasting and inclusive network to tackle Africa’s contemporary challenges while associating interdisciplinary research and co-construction with locals. IPORA aims to study the major challenges facing the African continent and to find concrete solutions.
This year, the participants were gathered around one primary goal: to Strenghten the Africa-Europe academic partnership (SAEAP), through many lectures and thematic sessions around crucial topics such as: global health and poverty – related inequalities / diseases, environmental safety, healthy cities, malnutrition across the continuum, training through research and many more.
Currently, about thirty research projects are structured within IPORA around five thematic axes, always with the aim of working over the long term:
- Food and nutrition system, with projects on food security and agricultural value chains
- Health and global inequalities, with a focus on childhood tuberculosis and access to healthcare in rural areas, childbirth in traditional settings
- Pollution and health, with studies about the impact of domestic and urban pollution
- Social protection and economic justice, to analyse social protection reforms and their impact on reducing inequalities
- Epistemic communities, which examines the construction of knowledge and the dynamics of academic partnerships between North and South.
These axes illustrate IPORA's philosophy of cross-sector governance, interdisciplinarity, public policy orientation, shifting the scale of funding, and other relevant topics.
This event proved to be an excellent opportunity for both African and European researchers to meet and exchange, as well as for students and institutional actors. It has been a prime opportunity for IPORA to connect with other academic networks, such as ENLIGHT.
For ENLIGHT, this event is a unique and important opportunity to widen its impact beyond Europe and to create solid bonds with African research networks. This enables ENLIGHT to explore new cooperation models, not only internationally but also intercontinentally.
Engaging in these talks has enabled the exchange of best practices in partnership and supported the development of interdisciplinary and international research projects. It has also contributed to aligning ENLIGHT’s ambitions with major global societal challenges, while integrating both African and European perspectives into an inclusive and sustainable research approach.
