LATIN AMERICA: Partnerships to boost higher education

After a consortium of 24 national and international university associations gathered in Colombia last month to launch a project to boost regional development of higher education, Latin American students entering universities this year will begin to see marked changes before they graduate, project officials say.

The three-year $3.5 million project, Alfa Puentes (meaning 'bridges' in Spanish), is funded by the consortium and the European Community.

It aims largely to bridge higher education partnerships and exchanges between the Latin American and European regions while adhering to Europe's Bologna process, which was launched in 1999 and helps to converge different country's university systems.

To the average student, that means improving the quality of learning and international exchanges, accomplished through enhanced institutional cooperation and sharing of best practices among institutions of both regions, said Michael Gäbel, head of the Higher Education Policy Unit and project coordinator for the European University Association (EUA), which represents 800 institutions.

"This project is special in the sense that we are cooperating with national and regional university associations, whose tasks are, on the one hand, to contribute on policy development and, on the other hand, to communicate and implement results at the institutions in their respective country or region," he says.

As a result, a much wider community of Latin American institutions will benefit, Gäbel added. "Plus, we are supporting existing initiatives and agreements for higher education convergence that already have been developed in the Latin American sub-regions, thus we stress the 'bottom-up' approach."

The idea for Alfa Puentes began about a decade ago, when the Latin American Common (LAC) Higher Education Area and the EU-LAC Common Higher Education and Knowledge Area appeared on the European Union's agenda, Gäbel said. This political commitment is based upon exchange of knowledge and partnership between higher education institutions in both regions.

Throughout the project, meetings and regularly updated work plans will keep the aims in focus and an internal final assessment will be shared with stakeholders.

Conferences for stakeholders will address issues such as the role of university associations in building the Latin American higher education space and new and ongoing sub-regional projects.

A region-wide survey of university leadership and faculty will provide comparable data on how universities are currently tackling issues related to learning and teaching, research, mobility and internationalisation, quality assurance and governance and management.