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This study aims at understanding how higher education institutions (HEIs) can contribute to sustainable development, by designing their programmes for bringing about a transformative impact on communities and students, and also to examine what alternative pedagogical approaches could be used for that. In the past decades, HEIs have increasingly created social innovation (SI) programmes, as a way to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. These community-oriented and field-based programmes are difficult to ally with conventional classroom education. This study explores how these programmes could integrate the participatory approach and what would be the benefits. It also investigates the effectiveness of the experiential learning approach for teaching sustainability.

A case study method is used to document SI projects initiated by an HEI programme in rural India.

It was found that the participatory approach contributes to empowering communities and also benefits the students in terms of academic, professional and personal growth. Empirical findings show that experiential learning is an efficient method to teach sustainability. Ultimately, both pedagogical approaches are found to be mutually beneficial.

This study fills a gap in the literature, by providing empirical evidence on how HEI can implement innovative educational strategies such as participatory approach and experiential learning in their programmes towards teaching sustainability. A conceptual model for HEI interested in developing similar programmes is also proposed. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first studies focusing on the context of Indian HEI.

This study looked at the potential applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) for inclusive community development and participation, sustainable tourism, and rural community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) in sub-Saharan Africa and other rural areas worldwide.

To evaluate resource management systems for rural tourism and the environment in Africa and abroad. The study makes use of reviews of relevant literature and documents, and while linking applications for sustainable tourism and local community empowerment with CBNRM and GIS, vital content was manually analyzed.

The study shows a potential affinity between agricultural and tourism businesses that GIS in line with the CBNRM conception can strengthen. In many rural and underdeveloped regions of the continent, this highlights the need for a credible and varied tourism strategy to develop and empower the relevant communities.

Most agricultural communities in Africa are located in low-income regions. Such areas are rich in natural wildlife and have popular tourist destinations. A mix of regional community development initiatives can be built using GIS, sustainable tourism, CBNRM, and community-based tourism (CBT).

In light of the inequality in access to farming land and the high prevalence of child malnutrition in Sudan, there is a lack of empirical research on the relationship between land ownership and child nutritional status. This study aims to examine the influence of agricultural landholding on the nutritional status of children under the age of five in rural Sudan.

The study utilizes data from Sudan’s 2014 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS), covering a sample of 10,753 rural children. The empirical analysis uses the two-stage least squares (2SLS) approach, adopting various estimation methods and model specifications for robustness check and comparison.

The results demonstrate that agricultural land has a positive and significant effect on reducing child malnutrition, signifying that children from families with agricultural land are less susceptible to malnutrition in Sudan. When examining the male and female sub-samples separately, the findings indicate a positive influence of land ownership on child malnutrition in the female sub-sample, while no significant impact is observed in the male sub-sample. This indicates a gender disparity in the effects of land ownership on child nutrition, with girls benefiting more from access to agricultural land compared to boys.

The study has several significant contributions. First, this is the sole study that examines the impact of agricultural land ownership on child malnutrition in Sudan. Second, considering the gender variations in nutritional status, investigating the influence of land ownership on child nutrition across genders addresses a significant gap in the current literature. Finally, the findings resulting from this study can contribute to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030, precisely focusing on SDG2 Goal 2: Zero hunger and SDG 10: Goal 10: Reduced inequalities.