Dullah Omar Institute Researchers take part in the Research and Innovation Staff Exchange Programme

Dr Tinashe Chigwata a senior researcher and Dr Michelle Maziwisa a postdoctoral research fellow at the Dullah Omar Institute have started their secondments in the European Union Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) programme. The programme promotes cross-border and cross-sector collaboration through sharing knowledge and ideas from research to market and vice versa within Europe and beyond.

Dr Maziwisa will spend 3 months at the Institute for Comparative Federalism while Dr Tinashe Chigwata will spend 2 months at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid . They will both conduct research on Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay. The Local Government and the Changing Urban-Rural Interplay is a research and innovation staff exchange project among 18 institutions on local government in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa.

The project ‘aims to form an international and intersectoral training and research network in order to provide best-fit practices for local governments to address the changing urban-rural interplay and manage its impacts’. It began in February 2019 and has a lifespan of four years. The LoGov project features a four-stage research process namely the identification of local government practices, evaluation of practices, comparison of practices, and sharing of best-fit practices.

According to Dr Chigwata, “the project enables us (from the Dullah Omar Institute) to share our experiences of local government practice in Southern Africa and to learn from the practice of local government in other regions.”

This project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 823961.