More than 200 people attended the inauguration of our new office in Universidad Nacional de San Martín
OBREAL staff, members and partners were exceedingly grateful for the positive feedback regarding the launch of a new office in Latin America. More than 200 people met with us onsite or online over two days, enabling us to listen to and have discussions with representatives from governments, institutions and associations from all over the world.
With this event, hosted on Februar 19-20 on the Miguelete Campus of the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Argentina, we managed to create a space for discussion and reflection on important topics for the education sector such as regional integration, financing, sustainable development, and interregional cooperation.
“Thank you for giving us the to have a home in Buenos Aires. A diverse home that will be open to all”
This new office will be, in the words of our Director of Strategy, Nicolás Patrici, a “diverse home that will be open to all: our members and those who aren’t members yet”. He stated that this new office will be used to continue working collectively in order to build bridges for others to cross.
OBREAL’s new office for South America: a space for support, amplification and expansion
The rector of UNSAM, Carlos Greco, inaugurated the event by thanking OBREAL for choosing UNSAM as the home of its new office for South America. He stated that this office “is not only a physical space but rather a space for support, amplification and expansion that we hope to share with you”. Argentina’s Secretary of Education, Carlos Torrendell, also spoke about support, noting that it was the intention of the Argentinian government to support and help carry out this initiative.
Representatives from other governments were also present at the inauguration. The Spanish Ambassador to Argentina, María Jesús Alonso Jiménez, stated that their strategic objectives parallel those of OBREAL to “create interregional bridges in the education sector”. In this regard, she says that OBREAL will likely be a great help to the embassy and that she hopes to work as much as possible with the organization.
“OBREAL will probably be a great help to the Spanish Embassy. We hope to work with them as much as possible.”
The EU Ambassador to Argentina, Amador Sánchez Rico, also celebrated the creation of OBREAL’s new office for South America, emphasizing that “good news such as this one is rare at the international level nowadays“. Likewise, the Catalan Government’s delegate to the Southern Cone, Josep Vives, highlighted the importance of the work that the organization does and expressed his wish to work closely with OBREAL as soon as possible.
In addition to government representatives, we also had the pleasure of hosting representatives of some of the most relevant associations in the Higher Education Sector: the Executive Director of EU-LAC, Adrián Bonilla; the Executive Director of ASCUN, Carlos Domínguez; the Secretary General of the AAU, Olusola Oyewole; the Executive Director of the Asociación de Universidades Grupo Montevideo (AUGM), Alvaro Rico; the Head of the Transnational Education and Cooperation Programs of the DAAD, Stefan Bienefeld; the Executive Director of the Southern African Universities Association (SARUA), Martin Oosthuizen; the Education Specialist at UNICEF, Cora Steinberg; the Director for Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems at UNESCO, Bohrene Chakroun; and representatives from CAF, CIN, and OEI among others.
The Julio Cotler Program
During the inauguration event, OBREAL’s President, Ramon Torrent, presented the Julio Cotler Program, an OBREAL initiative that targets young university students in their final year of undergraduate studies, as well as graduates from the past two years across all disciplines, including researchers, activists, and policymakers, with the objective of using Higher Education as an instrument for reducing social inequalities and building the institutional foundations of democratic systems.
“Thank you for creating a program that defines the intellectual and public pillars of who my father was”
Together with our president, the daughter of the late Julio Cotler presented the program to all the participants. Angelina Cotler, director of the Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Studies program at the Johns Hopkins University in the United States, thanked OBREAL for the creation of a program that “defines the intellectual and public pillars of who my father was”.
