Global Issues

School of Global Issues & World Systems

Conventional academic work localises understanding of global issues such as UN Sustainable Development Goals and underpinning world systems such as UN, UNESCO, WHO, IMF, and corresponding national systems, to specific departments – political science, history, economics, and international relations, for example.

We believe that, even without taking some of these field as majors, crucial questions about how disciplinary know-how intersects with challenging problems associated with the issues and systems must be asked of modern graduates. This strategic awareness includes perspectives around specific challenges confronting different countries, regions and continents, linked to such World Systems as:

  • educational, political, economic, religious, cultural, medical, and environmental.

The awareness must reckon with national budgets are structured to address these challenges, and the nexus between their resolution and the matrix of academic and professional knowledge in the country. Obvious considerations include national productivity and competitiveness, economic policies and management.

Research within the school is therefore about the nature of knowledge connectedness required for academics, students and professionals to generate profound impact of their learning on the wider society. It includes such perspectives as:

  • The nexus among disciplinary knowledge and UN Sustainable Development Goals, for example;
  • Understanding global issues and world systems via continual general cultural literacy, through media, internet, journals, professional magazines such The Economist, and trawls through the websites of world bodies, national ministries and departments, for example;
  • Development studies and informatics;
  • Quantitative social science and humanities;
  • Real world evidence for robust decision making, including
  • Systematic reviews, meta-analysis, strategic reviews and policy blueprints;
  • Specific work in government department-focused real world evidence, for example in support of health economics modelling;
  • Reviews of national budgets in line with what is known about political economic challenges in different government departments;
  • Global impact pathways including Political Economy Scorecards on corruption, competiveness, productivity;
  • Women and youth empowerment and employability;
  • Triple Helix academia-industry-government collaborations to resolve significant national, regional, and continental problems;
  • Structured networks and partnerships;
  • Capacity building and advocacy.

Enabling platforms/spin-offs

To capacitate citizens of different countries, especially developing economies with very weak institutions for checkmating debilitating corruption and ineptitude in government, we will train young leaders and mobilise communities of action and advocacy globally. For example, in Nigeria we will establish the following outfits:

  • Nigerian Economic and Social Development Movement (NESDEM);
  • Nigerian Economic and Social Development Party (NESDEP);
  • Nigerian Anti-Corruption and Political Economy Scorecard (NIPOLESCORE);
  • Nigerian Radical Education Curriculum Innovation Programme (NIRECIP).

These outfits will work tirelessly to renew Nigeria politically, economically, and educationally, including all key ministries, departments, and agencies through Citizens Power.

Citizens will be trained and mobilised through social and mass media to task every politician to account for the resources available to them for development of their constituencies, armed with comparative information on what those amounts will reasonably achieve on invested projects, within Nigeria and globally.

Global spin-offs

We will work to replicate the above-mentioned Nigerian structures globally, especially in developing regions of the world – Africa, Middle East, Asia, and South America.

We will mobilise in these countries and globally collective interventions involving hundreds of thousands of well-trained education and change-minded mediators who will engage in regular meditations and activities focused on achieving global coherence and innovations in the seven main world systems listed above. Hence, we will facilitate the following ICRED Global Coherence and Innovation Projects (GloCIPs):

  • ICRED GloCIP for Education;
  • ICRED GloCIP for Politics and Democracy;
  • ICRED GloCIP for Socio-Economic Development;
  • ICRED GloCIP for Religious Harmony;
  • ICRED GloCIP for Culture and Peace;
  • ICRED GloCIP for Health and Well-Being;
  • ICRED GloCIP for Environmental Sustainability.

Again, work in this school produces outstanding corporate-academic PhD theses, MSc dissertations, and advanced project outcomes, which can be spun-off as social enterprises, and for-profit born-global firms that are powered by the Internet.