We are delighted to welcome eight postdoctoral research fellows to the African Cities Research Consortium. Working across our eight urban development domains, the research fellows will be based at The University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute and will receive mentoring from dedicated members of the consortium’s research team.
The research fellows joining ACRC are:
Patience Adzande | Safety and security
Before joining the consortium, Patience was a senior lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Benue State University in Makurdi, Nigeria, where she also gained her PhD in urban and regional planning in 2017.
Elizabeth Dessie | Youth and capability development
Elizabeth completed her PhD in human geography at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden in 2021, with a thesis on the gendered livelihood strategies of migrant youth in Addis Ababa. She previously held roles in research and regulatory compliance with the Centre Jacques-Berque and the British Red Cross.
Miriam Maina | Housing
Most recently a postdoctoral fellow at the NRF Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Miriam completed her PhD in town and regional planning at the university in 2020, with her thesis examining the influence of spatial planning on urban space economies.
Ademola Omoegun | Neighbourhood and district economic development
Ademola joins ACRC having been a lecturer in architecture and urbanism at the University of Lagos since 2016. He earned his PhD in urban planning and international development from Cardiff University in 2015, with a thesis on street trader displacements in Lagos.
Smith Ouma | Informal settlements
Smith is completing his PhD at Cardiff University – focusing on urban land and spatial governance processes in Africa – where he also worked as a law tutor in the School of Law and Politics. Additionally, he was a research assistant on a project led by the Katiba Institute, Muungano wa Wanavijiji and Strathmore Law School aimed at improving access to justice and basic services in Nairobi’s informal settlements.
Matthew Sharp | Structural transformation
Previously a senior postdoctoral associate at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, Matthew completed his PhD in economic geography at the London School of Economics in 2020, with a thesis on spatial and labour economics.
Abdifatah Tahir | Land and connectivity
A member of parliament at the Federal Parliament of Somalia in Mogadishu since 2016, Abdifatah has also chaired its committee for roads, ports, airports, transport and energy since 2017. He received his PhD from the University of Sussex in 2016, with a thesis on urban governance, land conflicts and segregation in Hargeisa, Somaliland.
Ezana Haddis Weldeghebrael | Cross-cutting
Ezana has been at The University of Manchester since 2014, completing his PhD in planning and environmental management in 2019, with a thesis on inner-city redevelopment in Addis Ababa. He was awarded a GCRF Postdoctoral Visiting Fellowship for a participatory research project exploring post-Covid-19 slum upgrading in Addis Ababa and joined ACRC as a research associate in 2021.
Sign up to our e-newsletter for further updates about our research programme, and keep an eye on the African Cities blog over the next few months for more information about the postdocs and their work.
The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.
