As is the case for French policy on aid for development, Africa and the Mediterranean are priority regions for IRD.
Driven by the vision of an extensive Sahel-Maghreb research, training and innovation scope powering economic development and ensuring the security and well-being of populations, the Sahel Maghreb training and research platform (PSM) has been devised as a major coordination tool for the 2030 Agenda and its SDGs. The workshops organised in September and November 2015 set down five priority scientific areas and one cross-disciplinary component for capacity building. These areas form the platform’s foundations. On the French side, it will be developed by IRD together with Cirad and the AFD.
The Cesbio unit in Tunisia has introduced an innovative method for analysing water requirements and actual consumption in the main agricultural plains. Remote sensing provides access to spatialized estimates of evapotranspiration from surfaces, and can thus be used to estimate water withdrawals over large surface areas. This work was included in the ‘best student papers’ at the International society for optics and photonics (SPIE) conference in 2015.
In addition, 34 Tunisian, Moroccan and Algerian auditors took part in the winter school organised by IRD in March 2015 in partnership with the National Institute of Agronomics in Tunis (INAT) and the Tunisian National Institute for Research on Rural Engineering, Water, and Forests (INRGREF) on the theme of ‘Observation techniques and analysis approaches for water management in Mediterranean agricultural watersheds’.
Finally, the Lagunotox project has led to the installation of passive sensors to detect the presence of toxins caused by the proliferation of phytoplanktonic algae in the southern Mediterranean lagoons and especially Bizerte (Tunisia), Nador (Morocco) and Mellah (Algeria). This surveillance network will let decision-makers establish a balanced management policy for the lagoons concerned by these episodes of algal bloom.
In 2015, IRD was entrusted with the coordination of four sub-components of the higher education and scientific research programme making up the second phase of the debt reduction and development contract (C2D) in Côte d’Ivoire for 2016 – 2019. One sub-component is designed to support relevant research projects for social and economic development in Côte d’Ivoire, one takes ‘Expert group review and promotion’ as its theme, one is entitled ‘Support for the creation of a research observatory’ and one ‘Support for the strengthening and creation of PhD schools’. This comes on the back of a very positive review of IRD’s work during implementation of the research capacity building component in the first phase of the C2D (2014 – 2017).
The Nutripass joint research unit in Mali is running an evaluative research programme on the nutritional impact of social transfers via two projects headed by the Malian government with a number of international partners including the World Bank, Canadian Cooperation, the World Food Programme and Unicef. This evaluation work, implemented in partnership with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in several regions of Mali, led to several innovations including the use of remote supervision of areas that IRD was unable to visit for security reasons: data was collected by local interviewers using the telephone network and tablet computers, and checked every day. Feedback was then provided to the interviewers over the phone.
IRD’s presence in Mali has been strengthened via the partnership with the Applied Molecular Biology Laboratory (LBMA) for the development of groundbreaking biotechnological tools for the characterisation and epidemiological surveillance of diseases affecting rice and cassava. This work led to the creation of the CoANA (Coalition against agricultural pests) team of young researchers affiliated with IRD.
In addition, the network for the fight against helminths and their effects on public health (RELACS), funded by the Parraf programme, was involved in the Malian programme to fight neglected tropical diseases (NTD) and the management of the side effects of Praziquantel, a drug widely used to treat bilharzia. RELACS is also involved in the sub-regional project for integrated malaria and NTD control.
An agreement has been signed with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria), an independent organisation whose main goal is to facilitate research, promote publications based on research and create forums in which African researchers can share opinions and information.
After a positive evaluation by a joint external commission, the ICEMASA1 ICL was renewed for five years in South Africa. Its impact on the development of human capital through its Master’s and PhD courses has been acknowledged. The programme focuses on the study of physical processes on various scales from local to ocean basin, as well as ocean bio-geochemistry, climate interactions and the impacts of global changes on marine ecosystems. It is already part of a regional network with several institutes from neighbouring African countries such as Mozambique, and European stakeholders such as Norway’s Nansen-Tutu Centre for Marine Environmental Research. In the long term, the laboratory intends to set up an international marine scientific institute for Africa. In November 2015, Cap Town University and IRD signed a letter of intent for the creation of this institute.