by zefblog
The Center for Development Research (ZEF) is an interdisciplinary research institute with a focus on development issues. ZEF runs research projects in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In their blogs our researchers report about their work such as projects, conferences, scientific publications, field research, talks and other milestones. Authors express their own opinions, and ideas …
by Dennis Avilés and Tina Beuchelt
Blog post by Dennis Avilés-Irahola, Tina Beuchelt, Christine Schmitt, Sarah Nischalke, Eva Youkhana and Franziska Geiger. The authors are members of the Gender Group at ZEF. One would not have expected a vicious virus causing a respiratory disease to discriminate in its life-threatening passage. Yet, according to conventional wisdom, inequalities are revealed when disaster or …
by ZEFeditor
Blog post by Katelene Delgado*) When you think of the uninhabited Islands of Cape Verde, you probably immediately imagine large sandy beaches, blue sea and sun. However, the Raso and Branco Islets, both belonging to Cape Verde, look a bit different. There is an even greater treasure in these islets: the Cape Verde giant gecko …
Photos by Jorge Alberto Torres Castillo A couple of weeks ago, I finally landed in my home country, Honduras. I had spent 18 months as a doctoral researcher at ZEF, Bonn, Germany including two North Rhine-Westphalia winters in a row away from my tropical homeland. Like many others that choose to leave for better opportunities, …
Kenyan coffee is world-famous for its good quality. The major coffee-growing regions are located around Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Range, where the soil and altitude provide the best conditions for growing premium coffee. Kenyan coffee is one of the main contributors to the country’s foreign exchange earnings after tea and horticulture, and around 75% …
Setting off to southern Malawi The sun scorched us mercilessly as we got out of the Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Series. The water that we had just bought from the nearest town 30 kilometers away was as hot as our morning coffee. It was an October morning in Nsanje, the most southern located district of …
ماضٍ فيَّ حُكمُك عَدْلٌ فيَّ قضاؤُك “I was able to push from within, I had an innate desire to succeed.” Joan Benoit A bit before I was born and on February 1984, astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart were the two men ever to walk untethered in space for the first time. Six …
An important component of CIREG (Climate Information for Renewable Electricity Generation) is the implementation of a pilot study with the aim to electrify a village with about 120 households (~10kW) in Togo at the Mono River. Between the 2nd to the 6th of December, a CIREG team composed of partners from The Potsdam Institute for …
by Irit Eguavoen, Sebastian Forneck, Amit Kumar and Sneha Sharma
In September 2019, a group of ZEF researchers, among them three members of the “ZEF in the City” research group [find more information here] traveled to Delhi and other parts of India. New Delhi – urban green and climate strike Old Delhi has served as a capital for several empires from medieval times to modern …
Would you like to try some “pigeon poo” made of insect flour or learn that black soldier fly larvae can get overweight? Then join us on our journey to Madagascar’s insect sector…The ZEF-led ProciNut project organized two insect-rearing trainings, in addition to a regional policy roundtable in the central highlands as well as a national …
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” – …