We are very pleased to announce the installation on 29 January of Professor Deo Jaganyi as Vice-Chancellor of Mount Kenya University. He has moved back to his home country following a period as Director of Research at the University of Rwanda where he was a close collaborator in our work in the Centre for Sustainable, Healthy, Learning Cities and Neighbourhoods.

We begin this ambiguous New Year on an upbeat note: Chris Brooks demurs at the prevailing doom and gloom with which we farewelled 2020, noting causes for collective pride. Yet there is also a blunt closing challenge: in his rural village ‘flat-earthers’ display ‘thoughtless thinking and a failure to identify and examine the facts’. ‘Surely this is a major educational failure. What should we do?’ Brooks asks.