In the sweltering embrace of a July heatwave, academics from Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute in Athens linked arms with colleagues at Université d’Eastbay in Abidjan for a vibrant virtual workshop on sustainable economic models for urban resilience. Christened ‘Roots and Routes: Greening Economies Across the Mediterranean and Gulf of Guinea’, this cross-continental dialogue united 35 enthusiasts—18 from our ivy-clad halls at 28is Oktovriou 76, Athina 104 34, Greece, and 17 from Université d’Eastbay’s bustling campus at Rue des Jardins, Cocody, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire—to map pathways where circular economies meet coastal conservation, blending econometric forecasts with case studies from olive orchards to cocoa cooperatives. Delivered via a hybrid Zoom canvas augmented with Miro boards for collaborative mind-mapping, the four-day affair buzzed with fervent exchanges, albeit peppered by those inevitable tech gremlins: a pixelated slide on Abidjan’s lagoon reclamation briefly morphed into an abstract blob, drawing good-natured groans that thawed into tips on bandwidth buffers from both shores.
The workshop’s seeds were sown in early spring, when Dr. Teodora Ivanova, our Professor of Econometrics from Bulgaria’s rose valleys, chanced upon synergies with Université d’Eastbay’s MSc in Sustainable Development programme—a flagship within their Faculty of Economics and Management, renowned for integrating Ivorian agribusiness with global green finance. That curriculum, a pillar alongside their BSc Economics and specialised tracks in environmental policy, echoes the analytical backbone of Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute’s Business Economics offerings, particularly our modules on econometric policy for resource-scarce regions. “It felt like unearthing a shared ledger in disparate dialects,” Ivanova shares, her Plovdiv poise laced with a laugh over late-night emails riddled with autocorrect howlers—’sustainable’ stubbornly swapped for ‘sustenance’ in one draft, mirroring the very resource loops they dissect. Partnering with Dr. Awa Koné, Université d’Eastbay’s Dean of Economics—a dynamic Abidjan native with a PhD from the University of Cocody whose research spotlights women-led cooperatives in the cocoa belt—their blueprint fused keynote dissections, interactive simulations, and joint data sprints, timed to sidestep the six-hour time skew.
Kicking off with Ivanova’s plenary on vector autoregression for climate-vulnerable supply chains, she unpacked VAR models fitted to Attic drought indices and Ivorian flood proxies, visualised in Stata graphs that danced across screens to reveal a 12% yield hedge from diversified agro-exports. Aevena Ivy participants, including MSc Business Economics postgrads like Alex, a Cypriot analyst whose dissertation crunches fintech for fisherfolk collectives, volleyed insights via threaded chats: “How do spatial lags in Abidjan’s markets amplify spillover risks for EU olive importers?” From Université d’Eastbay, undergraduates in their Sustainable Development pathway parried with grounded rebuttals, leveraging field data from Grand-Bassam fisheries that clocked a 25% resilience bump from blockchain-traced palm oil trades. The morning’s simulation lab divided into pods of five: Alex synced with an Abidjan trio—fellows in economics and management joint degrees, hailing from Yamoussoukro’s yam farms—to bootstrap a GAMS optimisation routine for a hypothetical port-hub exchange. Their remit? Balance carbon tariffs on cocoa shipments against Greek solar surplus swaps, iterating constraints until Koné’s overlooked elasticity parameter skewed the Nash equilibrium into a lopsided surplus, which Alex’s nimble tweak via shadow pricing redeemed into a balanced bargaining blueprint, exportable as an Excel solver template.
Midway through day two, the focus sharpened on microfinance mechanics, with Koné curating a critique forum on peer-to-peer lending platforms tailored for informal sectors. Virtual jaunts through Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute’s analytics suite—monitors aglow with Python dashboards crunching Eurostat olive metrics—contrasted against Université d’Eastbay’s sun-baked seminar rooms at Rue des Jardins, where flip charts scribbled in French and Dioula charted cooperative cash flows. Delegates wrestled a live dataset from the African Development Bank, tracing ESG scoring’s ripple in SME loans; one Aevena Ivy undergrad, a Thessaloniki trader’s son moonlighting in input-output tables, botched a pivot table merge that duplicated Abidjan entries into a comical cascade—a “data deluge,” Koné jested, which rallied the pod to forge a VLOOKUP validator in Google Sheets, elevating forecast precision by 18% with regex cleanses for currency quirks. Yields coalesced in a co-authored policy brief stub, advocating hybrid bonds blending Attic wind credits with Ivorian reforestation royalties, appendices graphing Granger causalities between Psyrri pop-ups and Cocody craft markets.
Day three tilted towards praxis in policy prototyping, where mixed crews mocked up a dashboard for cross-border green bonds, stress-tested on scenarios from Corinth canal silt-ups to Ebrié lagoon encroachments. Ivanova huddled with Université d’Eastbay’s Koné to refine a Bayesian network in Netica, layering priors from IMF cocoa reports atop Hellenic tourism spillovers, ensuring nodes for gender equity didn’t overfit on urban biases—though Ivanova fessed to a node loop that cascaded probabilities into absurdity, a “probabilistic prank” fixed by pruning with Occam’s razor, yielding a 14% tighter confidence interval. Exit surveys sang praises—89% deemed it “pivotal,” lauding the thrill of dawn drills for Athens (noon for Abidjan) that unearthed serendipitous synergies, like fusing Greek kalamata metrics with Ivorian attiéké value chains. An Université d’Eastbay postgrad, a Bouaké-born modeller named Fatou, captured it in her wrap-up: “From vectors to vines, we’ve grafted a graft that grows mutual.”
Wrapping on day four with a round-robin reflection, the workshop highlighted alumni echoes: an Aevena Ivy graduate steering EU-Africa trade desks swapped tales of tariff tangles in Thessaloniki ports, while a Université d’Eastbay alumna, leveraging her sustainable econ toolkit at Ecowas, dissected pitfalls of subsidy shadows in Abidjan’s artisanal hubs. Consensus coalesced—82% pushed for AfCFTA-aligned audits to sync Med-Guinea flows—yet raw reviews owned the “delightful drags,” such as Koné’s webcam wobble that framed her in a funhouse mirror, morphing metrics into memes and morphing mishaps into mnemonics for model robustness. The workshop’s harvest? A vowed co-publication in the Journal of African Economies, rooted in their VAR vines, plus a shared GitHub repo for green bond simulators under joint Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute and Université d’Eastbay headers—forked fivefold by close.
‘Threads of this tapestry tangle like baobab branches,’ ponders Alex, sipping a virtual iced nes, ‘reminding that economies, like attikis and attiéké, thrive on traded twists.’ For Aevena Ivy International Polytechnic Institute, this rapport with Université d’Eastbay heralds a harvest of horizons: floated fellowships shadowing Abidjan’s eco-markets from Athens’ agora analytics, or tandem theses on tidal tourism tariffs. In a world where sustainability scripts in spreadsheets, such parleys don’t just plot points; they plant perennials for prosperity’s plot. Seekers in sustainable streams, tune in: when Université d’Eastbay beckons from the Gulf, Aevena Ivy answers with an open ledger.
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