Testimonials international collaboration

My involvement in ‘University Development Cooperation’ began thanks to a personal relationship. I freshly arrived at the LUC (the ancestor of UHasselt) when Paul Steels, a colleague of mine, entered my desk room to ask: « For years, we are trying to set up a project of medical education in Congo, without success. You speak good French, are you interested by leading it? ». The first trial was not successful, but the second trial was successful. We could do a second project with the faculty of medicine of the university of Kinshasa.

My third experience with Congo also began thanks to a personal relationship. It was another Paul, Paul Janssen, who asked me to lead the transversal part of the newly starting Institutional University Cooperation (IUC) project with the university of Kisangani. From capacity building at the level of a faculty, I went to the level of a university. I kept doing this in other IUCs (Meknes in Morocco, Lubumbashi in DR Congo).

What makes me rich of these experiences? I met humans with the same fundamental questions, with the same hope: that knowledge, academic values, are necessary to help the world face the challenges of our times.

Global partnership is the new name of University Development Cooperation. Besides partnership between institutions, relationship between people and even friendship may be the most important drives of my engagement in university cooperation.

Global partnership projects: academic research included

What makes VLIR-UOS projects on Global Partnership less attractive for academics than EU- of FWO-funded projects? The administrative burden? Not really: VLIR-UOS did a great job in simplifying the processes of the calls, reporting, etc, though it can still be ameliorated. The difficult language of this type of project? Neither: Horizon Europe or Erasmus language are not easier. The lack of a true scientific research dimension? This is the most tricky, indeed. Some of those projects are easily connected to forefront research when the research questions are directly linked to the regions with which one collaborates: think about epidemics, environmental or biodiversity studies. Some are more difficult to get associated with ‘excellent’ research. Some have nothing to do with research. For example capacity building as such, like helping students to acquire IT skills, building the foundation of a research coordination office of learning teachers how to make attractive slides.

Moreover, most of the time, those projects are not recognized at the same level as other projects for the promotion of researchers, not to say that Global Partnership projects take more time than more ‘classical’ research projects.

Something to put on the agenda of our university councils if we want that the new generation also engage themselves in Global Partnership.

In the Mid ‘90s, with the rise of PC’s and the early Internet, it became common within the 5 Flemish University Computer Centres, to travel to ‘the South’ to assist universities in adapting these new technologies within their local environments. After a first short mission to Lusaka, Zambia (training network technologies), I was asked by VLIR-UOS to head a major project in the D. R. Congo, consisting in installing a ‘backbone’ fiber network between the 10 faculty buildings on the main campus of the University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN). At the same time, UNIKIN would be connected to the Internet via a satellite antenna receiver.

The majority of the equipment was shipped from Belgium, but, as much as possible, local people/companies were hired to do the on-site work, e.g. digging trenches, drilling holes, installing cabinets, etc.

In general the project became a success, in the sense that it is still until today delivering network facilities to the whole university community.

At the same time it marked the ‘revival’ of Belgian Development aid to the DRC, which had more or less stopped due to the civil war in the late ‘90s.

I personally gained a lot of experience, but also many good friends, which remained active through several upcoming projects in e.g. Lubumbashi and Kisangani.

It finally shows that not only members of the Teaching Staff but also technicians or others can be eligible and most welcome in some of these challenging projects.

It’s a typical cold, grey day in Hasselt when I meet Irene, Thomas and Curthbert, MSc scholars in the VLIR-UOS IUC-project with Ardhi University (ARU) in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Their big smile immediately brings a warm feeling into the room and when we start talking about their stay in Belgium, they immediately mention that the most difficult thing to adapt to was the Belgian weather.  They have been studying and living in Hasselt for almost six months now and luckily all three of them really feel at home here.

I ask them about their expectations before they arrived and how it has been different from what they have experienced so far. To my pleasant surprise their answer is “We expected it to be difficult to integrate in Belgium, but this was not the case at all because everyone is very helpful and friendly and speaks English”. Irene was especially surprised how organized the city of Hasselt is and Thomas and Curthbert are inspired by the Belgian public transport.

In a few weeks, two of them are going back to Tanzania and so I ask them to tell me something about what they have learned in their study programmes at UHasselt and will take back home. Immediately, it is clear that their stay does not only have a personal impact. Irene, Thomas and Curthbert are lecturers and tutors at ARU and plan to share the experiences and skills they acquired in Belgium during their teaching assignments. They all confirm that they have broadened their horizon, got in touch with different views, see opportunities from a different perspective and can give students better advice.

Furthermore, all three of them hope to share their knowledge beyond the university walls. In Tanzania, the national government often calls upon the expertise of academics (consultancy) for the implementation of new projects. Irene hopes that the government will consult her so she can share what she has learned with respect to adaptive reuse. She emphasizes that in Tanzania there are many cities with heritage buildings and thanks to the MSc programme at UHasselt she has learned to see the potentials for these buildings. Thomas and Curthbert want to take home the intelligent transport solutions and advanced technologies that they familiarized themselves with in the MSc programme in Transportation Sciences.  They reveal that in Dar es Salaam a lot of focus is put on the infrastructural aspect of transportation, but that it is crucial to also incorporate technology. The students give as example that in Dar es Salaam, bus stops are always very crowded because people are waiting for hours, since they don’t know when the bus will come. As a result, public transport is only used by the poorest layer of the population and traffic is terrible because everyone prefers to use cars, boda boda (moto taxis) and bajaji (tricyles). The technology of having an app in which you can see the timetable, stops and even live tracking of a bus is something Thomas and Curthbert learned during their stay in Belgium and found very inspiring.

Within ARU, the three scholars want to promote the use of shared google drive, implement an information sharing platform (e.g. blackboard) and advocate for (free) access to software for students.

My last question for our Tanzanian visitors is what UHasselt could learn or implement from ARU. Irene, Thomas and Curthbert think about it for a minute and then unanimously respond that the continuous assessment system in ARU (70% final exam, 30% other tests/assignments) could serve as example for UHasselt. During the academic semester here, all three of them experienced the lack of feedback and had the feeling they didn’t really know how they were doing and progressing.

Sharing good practices between universities across the globe thus remains inspiring, as we can all learn from each other.

Thank you Irene Msuya, Thomas Njanda and Curthbert Njele