Bilateral AAU-Sida Agreements
- African Academic Mobility Scheme of the European Union Agreements
- Electric Power and Control Engineering PhD Program.
- Biotechnology for sustainable Development PhD Program
- International and Comparative Education PhD Program
- Management /Economics PhD Program
- AMAS (Academic Mobility for African Sustainable Development)
The project Academic Mobility for African Sustainable Development (AMAS) creates a great stage for contextual and evidence-based development for Africa with effective knowledge exchange between five universities in four distinct regions: MU, Kenya (leading applicant); UM5R, Morocco; AAU, Ethiopia; UAC, Benin; UEM, Mozambique; and UBT, Germany (technical partner). AMAS is based on long-standing experience of each of the partners in management of international projects. All partners have intensively worked together since 2007 within the BIGSAS network. AMAS is innovative since it implements internationalization by a) building on Common thematic Fields of Study (CFS) that create the common ground of exchange of students and staff; and b) identifying study programs, which are unique at each of the participating institutions. They form a set of Special Benefit Programs (SBP). They offer distinctive specializations at the host institutions, which add unprecedented value to a student’s formation not available at the home institutions. The students’ experiences will influence the development, enhancement and harmonization of existing programs and the implementation of new study programs at the home institutions.
The participating institutions accommodate the particular needs of the distinct target groups carefully. 1. Most of the participants in the mobility will be credit-seeking: 2/3 of the MA and all PhD students. The reasons are twofold: a) This reflects the distinct life cycles of individuals who have family obligations, which do not allow them to leave for long-term studies; b) The shorter period of credit seeking mobility allows for higher number of mobility within the same general financial framework. 2. Every participating institution will send to and will host the same number of students and staff from the other partners. 3. An important focus of the project is to assure gender balance in the envisaged mobility: 50% of the mobile academics shall be women.
Partners
University of Bayreuth, Germany
Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
University of Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique
University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin
University of Mohammed V de Rabat, Morocco
- Africa Regional International Staff/Student Exchange: Food Security and Sustainable Human Wellbeing II
In accordance with the objective of the call for proposals, the overall objective of the project INTRA AFRICA – Africa Regional International Staff/Student Exchange: Food Security and Sustainable Human Wellbeing (ARISE) II is to promote sustainable development and ultimately contribute to poverty reduction by increasing the availability of trained and qualified high level professional manpower in Africa and thereby improve the skills and competences of students and staff through enhanced intra-African mobility. The project will particularly aim to enhance mobility and collaborative research in the areas of Agriculture / Food Security and Health Sciences. The partnership takes particular note of the number of students through INTRA ACP ARISE who are currently pursuing Agriculture / Food Security related courses (16 out of 38) and medical sciences (9 out of 38). To the partnership this is indicative of those fields of research as being critical priority areas of national development in the partner countries and the African continent at large. Hence the fields of study focussed on in ARISE II further leverages and builds on the commitment by the Consortium under ARISE to develop African capacity in the area of Food Security and Sustainable Human Wellbeing. The partnership represents higher education institutions situated in 3 regions of the African continent including an associate partner and a technical partner in the European Union:
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Makerere University, Uganda
Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia
University of Ghana, Ghana
University of Leuven, Belgium
International Education Association of South Africa: IEASA (South Africa associate partner)
- Application of Biotechnology for Environmentally Safe and Sustainable Food Security and Green Development of Ethiopia
Today biotechnology is considered as the main driver of the emerging bio-economy in the world promoting sustainable green growth. Thus biotechnology proved to be very important for agricultural, industrial, health, and environmental applications. In recent years the Ethiopian government, recognizing the potential of biotechnology for the country’s sustainable development, has established biotechnology centers in a number of higher education and research institutions. However, biotechnology being knowledge- and capital-intensive discipline, many of these institutions suffers from shortage of a critical mass of trained manpower and lack the necessary laboratory facility to carry out sustained cutting edge research and training.
The Institute of Biotechnology (IoB) at AAU is the main institution mandated by the government to train the required manpower for all biotechnology departments and institutes throughout the country and play a leading role in carry out cutting edge research to address the country’s major development challenges. But IoB at AAU, though relatively well staffed and is based on decades of experience starting from the former Department of Biology at AAU, is not still fully self sufficient to meet these challenges. Therefore, it is important to form partnerships and collaborations with well-established institutions, such as SLU.
Development of a sustainable bio-economy that promotes green growth mainly depends on sustainable use of the available biodiversity using modern biotechnological techniques. Therefore, plant, animal, and microbial biodiversity are the main driving forces of the modern bio-economy that serve as a source of new products and services. Ethiopia as Vavilonian gene center of crop diversity is endowed with an enormous biodiversity that can serve as a platform to establish a successful bio-economy. Above all, Ethiopia has an extremely unique microbial diversity, many of them found in extreme habits, not found anywhere else in the world.
The first objective of this proposed project is to train Ethiopian students at PhD and MSc level in modern biotechnology and to develop capacity for research. The project will be a collaborative effort between SLU from Sweden and AAU from Ethiopia and aims at utilizing the country’s biological resources to develop novel products and services. In the project’s life span it is planned to train a total of 24 PhD and 30 MSc students from Ethiopia in modern biotechnology. Students will carry out their research in a sandwich mode and will be jointly supervised by staff from both partner Universities. A total six subprojects encompassing agricultural, industrial, health, and environmental biotechnology were identified. Under each subproject specific PhD research project titles are identified. Under each subproject PhD students will employ cutting edge biotechnology tools to address their specific topics.