On 8 September 2021, DIE organised a joint virtual roundtable with the German Welthungerhilfe. Four issues were discussed, including COVID-19 in Africa.
After introductory remarks by Matthias Mogge, Secretary General and Chairman of the Board of Welthungerhilfe, on the new strategy of Welthungerhilfe, and by Prof. Dr. Anna-Katharina Hornidge on the research strategy of the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE), interdisciplinary experts from Germany, Niger, India, Zimbabwe and Myanmar exchanged views on the following topics:
1) ‚COVID-19 in Africa‘, with a keynote presentation by Dr. Christoph Strupat,
2) ‚Approaches to Support Smallholder Farmers in the Global South in Crisis Management: Controversies, Experiences, Syntheses‘, with a keynote presentation by Dr. Michael Brüntrup,
3) ‚Political Destabilization Processes & Fragile States in Times of Covid-19‘, with a keynote presentation by Dr. Sebastian Ziaja,
4) ‚Nexus humanitarian aid / security policy and the positioning of the EU in the respective contexts‘, with a keynote speech by Dr. Ina Friesen.
The workshop served to get to know each other and identify cooperation potentials on overlapping themes, such as strengthening rural and urban livelihood systems, poverty reduction, impact orientation, democracy promotion, and conflict prevention. Additionally, complementary perspectives from local, national and regional levels allow for interaction along the rural-urban continuum and regarding specific issues of policy advice. The DIE thanks Welthungerhilfe for this very fruitful exchange and looks forward to possible collaborations in the future!
