Achievements

Management and Economics

  • A series of supervision trips to Sweden have been made by AAU staff from the Departments of management and Economics. This effort had brought together Swedish and Ethiopian professors to make direct face-to-face consultations with their students in academic environment of Swedish standards. This has given both the Ethiopian professors and PhD candidates the opportunity to caliber themselves to international standards.
  • Again in connection to supervision, AAU staff members have gained substantial trainings in supervision skills directly form Swedish professors specialized in the field. The impact of this supervision training will obviously reflected in the improvement of the quality of the PhD dissertations that will come in the coming two or three years.

Biotechnology

  • Biotechnology Research and Training Program in Ethiopia are poorly delivered due to poor research infrastructure and manpower. Biotechnology Research and Training Program in Ethiopia partnership with Swedish Agricultural University will improve the quantity and quality of graduates working in the sector and building the capacity of Addis Ababa University.

Selected activities of the inception workshop

  • An inception workshop was conducted from Nov 12-13, 2018 at the Institute of Biotechnology, Addis Ababa University. Prof. ZerihunWoldu, the director of research, AAU, has opened the workshop. Presented were Institute of Biotechnology and Swedish Agricultural University project partners; Institute of Biotechnology staff; invited department heads from College of Natural and Computational science , AAU; invited heads and researchers from Universities in Ethiopia delivering biotechnology educational programs; researchers engaged in biotechnology from research institutions; managing director as well as purchase and finance directors from CNCS, AAU.The activities conducted include: introduction among the participants, presentations on educational and research programs of SLU and IoB, AAU; presentations of the six subprojects under the biotechnology project by the respective IoB and SLU partners; experience sharing discussion on attracting international research grants by professors from SLU and experienced staff of IoB; poster sessions and networking.
  • After Announcement of the open PhD position in various ways; accepting application in person as well as by e-mail; 18 PhD Applicants selected. Orientation given to students about the PhD program and also the SIDA project, the PhD candidates took 2 semester courses,

Swedish Professors teaching the PhD module “Genomics, Transcriptomics and metabolomics” for Year I PhD students in Biotechnology (Supported by SIDA Project) at the Institute of Biotechnology, AAU from

Field visit to Lake Abijata by members of SP4 during February 2019 (4 PhD students, IoB supervisor as well as 4 SLU supervisors)

  • After preparing Job TOR, Announcement for 1 Job application, 1 laboratory technician employed

University-Industry Linkage and Technology Transfer Office

  • Development of University Industry Linkage and Technology Transfer Policy:

This policy will help each college, institutes, schools and the University at large. Partnership and close collaboration of universities and industries that foster practical knowledge building and also facilitate technology transfer is vital. Students need to be nurtured and capacitated with practical knowledge that could only be achieved with close partnership and win-win arrangements between universities and industries in general. Owing to this, Ethiopian educational system has emphasized the University Industry Linkage and technology transfer concern that initiated establishment of offices in all public universities across the country. Addis Ababa University has established this office with keen belief that coordinated collaboration is achieved in all institutes and collages. However, with the growing expansion of the university and educational programs, ratifying a policy that governs activities of University Industry Linkage and technology transfer is deemed to be critical. Therefore, the aim this policy is to guide the overall partnership of the university with industries and associated technology transfer affairs. The draft has already been submitted and the final policy will be ready soon.

  • The Teaching and Learning Support Office (TLSO) is one of the units under the Academic Vice President which mainly focuses on providing support to the University community in general and instructors and students in particular. The office has conducted need assessments at different level and identified gaps, for which proposals have been developed and implemented. Some of these activities are academic staff professional development, class room renovation and equipping with latest technologies that would support the teaching-learning processes. In this line, the support we obtained from SIDA was remarkable.
  • The TLSO has managed to organize four different trainings between November and December 2018. The trainings were:-
  • Educational planning and management: This training was given for about 32 senior and junior experts under AVP by a professional from the College of Education and Behavioral studies.
  • SPSS – Statistical Package for the Social Sciences: SPSS Statistics is a software package used for interactive or batched, statistical analysis. It is an application that can aid in quantitative data handling. The training was given in collaboration with the Department of Statistics, College of Natural and Computational Sciences. It helps the experts to interpret and analyze d

CSPro – Census and Survey Processing System. 

  The main purpose of the training was to help the experts to design application for data collection and processing. Similarly the training was given in collaboration with the Department of Statistics, College of Natural and Computational

    • The International benchmarking was planned to get experiences on digital pedagogy from selected Swedish Universities. In that regard, Jonkoping University showed interest to host us and was visited by two academic staffs from AAU; namely the director for teaching and learning support office and the director for academic standards and quality enhancement. During the six day stay different units at College of Education were visited and important experiences were gained that would be applied at our university context. The teaching and learning support office is grateful for the support obtained from SIDA and wishes to work with SIDA in the future as well.

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