The Coordinated Humanitarian Response, Health and Displacement action-research project aims to implement an international master's degree, including European and African universities - HumanResponse Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree. The programme aims to provide a unique multidisciplinary programme in teaching and research about life-saving assistance and displacement in volatile contexts. The Erasmus Mundus project provides 60 scholarships for students, teacher mobility and lectures by Visiting Scholars from various countries.  In addition, it contributes to research with articles on innovative topics. The programme is jointly developed by Iscte-University Institute of Lisbon, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Makerere University (MU), University of Cape Verde (UniCV), University of Santiago (US), University of Athens (UAthens) and University of Rovuma (URovuma). The first semester is spent in Lisbon, Portugal, the second semester in Trondheim, Norway, and the third semester in Kampala, Uganda, before the students move to one of the seven partner institutions to work on their master’s thesis. In the fourth-semester students may collect dissertation data in humanitarian contexts with 23 institutions (associated partners) in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America or Asia. The curriculum is taught by both academics and practitioners, emphasizing problem-based learning and knowledge application opportunities in summer schools and internships.   HumanResponse tackles both research and teaching to address the pressing need for professionalisation of humanitarian workers through: fostering South-North collaboration and multi-stakeholder cooperation, strengthening localized leadership, and articulating theory and practice to navigate organizational complexity in humanitarian action.

Identifying and designing gender responsive and transformative interventions that effectively address barriers faced by caregivers in accessing services and health workers in delivering services in Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tome and Principe.  Iscte team will conduct a gender related barrier assessment and work with the government to collaboratively design interventions that will be integrated into the larger immunisation programme and primary health care. The tailored solutions proposed will address the social and structural barriers that impact the delivery of immunisation and other health services to communities with low vaccine rates. The barrier analysis and consolidation of proposed solutions will be verified with a participatory approach with stakeholders living and working in low coverage areas. Moreover, the interventions are to be integrated as part of the primary health package of each country and build the capacity of the health staff to adapt these interventions in the future.   

With the support of Camões IP, the Centre for International Studies of Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon and the School of Education and Social Sciences of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria are holding a project on: The Profile of PALOP Students at HEIs in Portugal: characterisation, expectations, difficulties. The aim is to continue reflecting on education co-operation between African countries and other countries in the light of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically SDG 4 and SDG 8. Over the past decade, there has been a notable surge in the presence of students from PALOP countries within the Portuguese university system. Thanks to agreements forged between the Portuguese government and the governments of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, students from these nations can pursue higher education through dedicated slots for international students, with tuition fees on par with those applicable to domestic students and those from the European university area. Despite the evident growth in the number of students hailing from these regions, the available studies on this demographic are sparse and predominantly monographic. It is crucial to attain a more comprehensive understanding of this evolving landscape, wherein Portugal aligns itself with the SDGs, particularly SDG 4 and SDG 8, thereby facilitating the advanced education and training of these students.

This project analyses the intersection of human rights and gender in two west African countries, Guinea Bissau and Senegal, by looking into the local resistances to sexual and reproductive rights. Through a consideration of the evolving cultural practices relative to sexuality, and the ideological refashioning of society, we consider activisms for gender equality, against gender based violence and promotion of rights to sexuality, we focus on how society engages with body politics. While there has been a multiplication of studies, in the last decades, around the way the social is produced through the regulation of sexuality, most studies present a fairly schematic conceptualisation of normativity. This project builds upon a previous knowledge on sociocultural dynamics and cultural values to consider the obstacles to the social change coded in the promotion of sexual and reproductive rights.

External Evaluation to the Intervention of Portuguese Cooperation in the Education (Preschool, Primary and Secondary) Sector in Guinea-Bissau (2009-2016) - Provision of Services

The Multisectorial Academic Program to prevent and combat female Genital Mutilation (FGM/C) is an innovative project aimed at raising awareness, knowledge and skills of future professionals in contact with possible victims of FGM/C in the European Union. For this purpose, a pluridisciplinary team of professors and researchers have developped a Mutilsectorial Academic Training Guide, that will be soon available in 6 languages.

AMITIE CODE (Capitalizing On Development) is a European Commission funded project that involves Public Authorities and NGOs operating in 6 different European Countries. It's main goal is to raise awareness among citizens on migration, development and human rights and to train key actors on these issues, mainly teachers and civil servants working in Local Authorities. In our opinion, local communities and the involvement of young people in promoting human rights and sustainable lifestyles play a key role in facilitating change.

 The main goal of this project is to enlighten the role of the private health sector in selected African countries emphasizing the access of women to health care. We consider that women are the more sensible sector of the population to the international macro-economic decisions that lead to the development of the private health sector in countries dependent of external aid. A more detailed knowledge of health care options for women and of their choices in this sector is essential for the implementation of an effective health strategy coordinating both public health planning and the heterogeneous private sector. The question of the implementation of the private sector in Africa is mainly about development policies, about the population access to basic health care and poverty reduction, about medical pluralism, about access to commodities and essential goods, about human rights, about cultural creation and about the globalized market. The private health sector in Africa refers to a heterogeneous field of operation that comprises the action of nonprofit organizations such as NGOs and associations, and profit institutions that stand from private clinics and medicine sellers to traditional therapists. This sector has been developing in Sub-Saharan Africa on the aftermath of the local governments progressive abandon of the public health programs following the imposition of the Structural Adjustment Plans of the late eighties and nineties. It is estimated that more than a half of the health investment in the continent comes from the private sector, even if there are strong disparities between the different African countries (Ghatak, Hazlewood & Lee, 2008). \n Structural adjustment’s effect on women differs from its effect on men, as the later are more often remunerated and women have to ensure the household survival (Pfeiffer, Gimbel-Sherr & Augusto, 2007). Women vulnerability is increasing under privatization of health care (Turshen, 1999). WHO have long recogniz...

Vulnerability is a characteristic which is socially recognized as being common in migrant communities. Health problems are exacerbated by poor integration into the general community, social and economic levels that are below the average in the country of residence, cultural and linguistic barriers, etc. Though these factors have long been recognized, and a number of campaigns have taken place to improve awareness of the risks of infectious diseases (such as TB, hepatitis and AIDS) among this population, there has been in Portugal, up to the present, no anthropological reflection with any degree of depth on this process of encounter between different kinds of knowledge and practice of cure, linked to specific historical and cultural contexts, nor a thorough analysis of the opportunities and risks which stem from medical pluralism. The need for this reflection on migrant's pathways to care is particularly felt in na area such as Lisbon, whose urban space is also a space where autonomous logics and worlds coexist, a field of dramatic change, of deep social contrast and power struggles, of new identity dynamics, of unpredictable shades of individual subjectivity. On the one hand, health care providers are confronted by such a sharp gradient of cultural otherness that a real risk arises of inadequacy and even inability to apply routine processes of clinical intervention; at the very least, their effectiveness is strongly reduced. On the other hand, in many cases migrants lose their bearings when confronted with a biomedical "morality" - defining risk, disease, health and cure, and conditioning the perception and representation of the body - that, for them, does not make any sense. When they demand na explanation, the inadequacy of the biomedical interpretations is felt with acute discomfort by the migrants. The research project we propose to undertake finds the main objectives of its reflection in the suffering, the emotions and the discontent of migrants: it is in those...