The Interregional Dialogue on Education and Development in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa will be held in person from 28 to 31 March 2023 in the city of Buenos Aires. This event responds to the will expressed during the III Meeting of Ministers of Education of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States held in May 2022 in Buenos Aires in relation to the configuration “of a regional higher education space as an instance of academic integration and solidarity cooperation that facilitates dialogue and synergies with extra-regional partners – with special emphasis on South-South cooperation – in close collaboration with the Latin American and Caribbean Higher Education Area (ENLACES), to move forward with the agreements proposed in the framework of the Regional Conferences on Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean. ” This meeting will aim to follow up on the work agenda agreed at the Interregional Dialogue Meeting on the role of South-South-North interregional cooperation in higher education for development: focus on Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe, co-organised by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Argentina, CELAC and OBREAL Global on 23 November in the city of Barcelona.

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This meeting was hosted and promoted by OBREAL Global and the Argentinian Ministry of Education as Pro-tempore Presidency of CELAC (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños). The event brought together both government representatives and representative HE associations and organisations to discuss:

a) The concrete ways in which the university and HE sector is contributing to the local and regional development agenda, notably along several thematic axes: Climate change, energy, conflict

b) Current examples of South-South-North Africa – Latin America – Europe collaboration to this effect and the perspectives for and importance of expanding this type of multi-regional collaboration

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The Objective of the DHG Forum was to share expertise, experiences, to enhance co-operation among donors and capacity development programmes implementing agencies, or relevant resource organisations in the higher education and research sectors.

Initially the DHG was set up to bring the Paris Declaration (2005) into practice, hence the name donor harmonisation. However, at the first meeting in Scheveningen in 2010 that objective proved to be unrealistic as most educational co-operation programmes had a strong reciprocal benefit policy. But the idea of trying to prevent overlap in activities, to find ways to collaborate with each other, and share expertise and experiences formed a solid basis for these annual meetings. The initiative for the first meeting in 2009 was taken by both the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir) and Nuffic.

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OBREAL Global co-organised together with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the African Association of Universities (AAU) and the Latin American and Caribbean Higher Education Area (ENLACES), and with the support of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Spanish Service for the Internationalisation of Education (SEPIE), the African Union, the EU-LAC Foundation, the University of Barcelona, the HAQAA initiative and the Colombian Association of Universities (ASCUN) a Cocktail-Debate on the Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs -.
During this event, participants had the opportunity to listen to interventions from experts from different parts of the world, who constituted a high-level and inter-regional panel.

This cocktail debate, entitled Higher Education and the SDGs: interregional perspectives, brought together more than 150 representatives from leading higher education institutions, and served as a networking space in which synergies were generated between the different regions of the world represented at this event.

There is a great diversity of strategies for internationalising a curriculum and each experience is differentiated according to the nature of the university courses or degrees involved, the context in which they are developed and the capacities of individual teachers. An important part of the process of creating internationalisation strategies is to think beyond dominant paradigms, to explore emerging paradigms and to imagine new possibilities and new ways of thinking and doing. Therefore, the aim of presenting good practices is to encourage participants to imagine ideas that can then be applied in their own teaching practice.

The concept of “good practice” refers to any experience that is guided by principles, objectives and appropriate procedures or advisable guidelines that conform to a certain normative perspective or an agreed parameter, as well as any experience that has yielded positive results, demonstrating its effectiveness and usefulness in a specific context.

The webinar series foresees the presentation of cases of good practices in universities in Central America, Mexico, Argentina and Spain.

This virtual webinar series is being organised as an immediate follow-up to the Africa-EU Summit (17-18 February, 2022). It is intended to provide an opportunity for the higher education sector in Africa and Europe to understand better the commitments made by the Summit, to debate specific topics and share initiatives that would contribute to reaching the goals set and to create opportunities in line with the Summit’s emphasis on higher education, skills and research. It is organised collaboratively between AAU, the coordinator of the ‘Cluster’ for Higher Education of the African Union’s Continental Strategy for Education (CESA) and OBREAL Global, with support and input from important regional higher education associations in Africa and Europe. The series is open to all interested stakeholders of the higher education and research sector across the African continent, as well as EU counterparts and partners in other world regions with a keen interest in African higher education development and its global projection.

OBREAL Global and the EU-LAC Foundation organised two webinars on 6 and 7 April 2022 and a panel at the third UNESCO World Higher Education Conference (WHEC 2022) in Barcelona from 18-20 May 2022 on Open Science: Innovations, Challenges and Projections for the Future based on an Inter-Regional Dialogue.

Open science has risen to the top of the international scientific agenda because of its relevance for research and equal access to knowledge and scientific production. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Directors-General of UNESCO, the World Health Organisation, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a call for open, inclusive, and collaborative science. However, dialogues and cooperation on open science between the EU and LAC, and between them and other regions of the world, have been scarce, so it can be assumed that the facilitation of spaces for such exchanges could unleash synergies and innovations in this area. In this context, the EU-LAC Foundation and OBREAL Global are organising these two events.

OBREAL  Global and European University Association organised a pre-event of the Africa EU-Summit  Africa-Europe: Enhancing Higher Education Systems through Regional and Inter-Regional Approaches

This three-part webinar shared distinct experiences and examples of Africa-EU Higher Education collaboration, but also pointed out the importance of further investment in enabling frameworks and capacity building at various levels. 

The event traced the wealth of cooperation that has taken place in the sector since Abidjan and aimed to chart the course for the next phase, especially in terms of promoting the inherent links between higher education and other policy areas, such as research, trade and sustainable development, and the role of regional and continental policy frameworks.

The first of the OBREAL Global’s Interregional Dialogues series is being organised by the Brazilian Association for Higher Education – FAUBAI -,  Symbiosis International University, the South American and the Indian OBREAL Global Chapters and is supported by the Higher Education of Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry   -FICCI-.   

On this occasion, during the next 3 months, we will be discussing internationalisation and cooperation in higher education with partners in South America and India. It will be a great occasion to learn more about both regions and their institutions and challenges and to enhance and support bridges and links between both regions.

The Chapter South America organised a series of webinar that aimed to present and discus, from an inter-regional perspective, the main trends on internationalisation of the curriculum and digitisation of learning. The webinars were conducted together with OBREAL Global members, the associations of rectors and universities of Brazil (ANDIFES), Chile (CRUCH), Colombia (ASCUN) and Mexico (ANUIES), the Asociación de Universidades del Grupo de Montevideo, LINED of the Universidad de Mar del Plata in Argentina, the Universidad Veracruzana of Mexico, FAUBAI (Brazil) SARUA (South Africa), CSUCA (Central America) and SIU (India) and with the participation of OBREAL Global´s partners EUA (Europe) and EAIE (Europe).

There is a great diversity of strategies for internationalising a curriculum and each experience is differentiated according to the nature of the university courses or degrees involved, the context in which they are developed and the capacities of individual teachers. An important part of the process of creating internationalisation strategies is to think beyond dominant paradigms, to explore emerging paradigms and to imagine new possibilities and new ways of thinking and doing. Therefore, the aim of presenting good practices is to encourage participants to imagine ideas that can then be applied in their own teaching practice.
The Cycle foresees the presentation of cases of good practices in universities in Central America, in other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Argentina, and in other regions of the world.

This series of online events formed part of the groundwork for the development of a ‘Policy Data Unit’ in Africa, which is a new approach to generating comparable data on higher education across the continent, closely rooted in the Continental Education Strategy for Africa (CESA) and the structures surrounding it. It was organised by the AAU, with the support of OBREAL Global and in close collaboration with the coordinators of the higher education sub-group of CESA, through the HAQAA2 initiative.

The OBREAL Global webinar series “Building Bridges across the Globe” was launched in response to the global pandemic, as a means to connect partners and members from diverse continents and to explore themes of common and emerging interest. The series was distinctive in that it proposed a truly global dialogue, based on cooperative projects and initiatives that OBREAL Global supports. The objective was to maintain the momentum of these projects and initiatives, debate their relevance in the period of tele-working and distance education and establish new bridges between regions and continents that do not have permanent linkages of traditional cooperation in a structured way.