Edulink II

On 1st March 2010, Dr. Mohamed Ibn Chambas took over as new Secretary General of the African Caribbean and Pacific Group (ACP) and the ACP Secretariat, a 79-strong group of nations.

He accedes to the post at a crucial time for the ACP Group requiring firm leadership in the face of challenges such as the various regional trade packages the EC is concluding with individual African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) regions.

Importance and state of Agriculture in Africa

Approximately 80% of Africa’s population depends directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. The agricultural sector provides 70% of Africa’s full time employment, one third of total GDP, and 40% of total export earnings. However, productivity of the agricultural sector is very low, leading to rampant food insecurity and poverty.

The VASES-MAPPES Project is a multinational and transcontinental consortium that brings together the institutional and academic capacities of Makerere University in Uganda, St. George's University School of Veterinary Medicine in Grenada and Kigali Institute of Science and Technology in Rwanda. These three Partner Institutions share knowledge and expertise to improve the ability of policy makers, University managers and academic staff to better "vocationalise" the animal sector education and to produce graduates who will offer the much needed entrepreneurship, trade and safety skills.

A new Call for Proposals is scheduled to be published before the end of 2010 with a financial volume of € 20 million. In its broad outline it will be similar to the 3 previous calls, but there may be differences in some details.

All information regarding the new call will be published on this website as soon as it becomes available.

Today, as we go live, the site already sets out the programme and its projects better than its predecessor. However, we intend to go much further, and turn this into a true community of people interested in higher education, specifically in ACP countries, whether they are actively involved in an EDULINK project or not.

Shortly before the 3rd EDULINK Stakeholders Conference on 01 – 02 October in Lisbon, the ACP Secretariat asked all the projects to submit a short paper, explaining how the project addresses and/or contributes to poverty alleviation in ACP countries and regions.

To date, 23 projects out of 66 have responded to the request, i.e. slightly more than ⅓. Non-respondents are reminded that their answer is still expected.

From the analysis of these 23 papers, a pattern emerges that can confidently be expected to be confirmed as more replies are received. Essentially, it is characterised by 2 aspects:

The SideCAP project helps to promote poverty reduction and promote sustainable development in ACP states because the work of the project focuses on the use of open source software and free software in the design of educational courses.

Recent reviews of scientific capacity building in the population sciences in the developing world indicate a skills dearth which is particularly acute in Africa. This compromises the ability of African scientists—ironically, those most-knowledgeable of that context—to contribute to the global discourses on health and development. It is precisely also this human capacity that is required for the monitoring and evaluation of progress toward development targets such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Organic agriculture offers a sustainable solution to many environmental and food security problems in West Africa and at the same time can improve livelihoods. The overall objective of this project is to increase the level of awareness of the potential benefits of organic agriculture in West Africa and to increase expertise in all aspects of organic agricultural production in the West African sub-region.