The Wider objective of CONSEA is to ensure Biodiversity Conservation & Environmental sustainability around the Mekong River Basin. CONSEA consortium aims to develop a strong education program on biodiversity conservation in SEA. In spite of socio-economic difficulties of Cambodia and Vietnam, these countries are located in biodiversity hotspots. These territories endowed of added value are under constant pressure due to habitat loss and degradation. Challenges of CONSEA are to develop a strong cooperation in Higher Education at regional, national and international levels, in order to enhance education awareness and to share research findings. Capitalization and sharing of good practices will allow conservation and sustainability of Mekong River Basin. CONSEA project is focused on 4 HEIs partners from Cambodia and Vietnam. Four european universities from 4 different countries are involved. Their expertises are recognized around the world and they have already participated in cooperative projects with SEA, through participation in several previous Erasmus Mundus projects. In order to cover the whole Mekong river basin territories and initiate an inclusive approach, CONSEA consortium associates 6 associated partners from China and Thailand. Meanwhile, two other institutions from France and Cambodia will support and participate in CONSEA activities. CONSEA consortium plans to reinforce Master/PHD degree curriculum and humans resources in domains of Biodiversity Conservation and Environmental sustainability. In order to achieve this objective, exchanges of goods practices, training sessions of staff and PhD in EU and local training will be implemented. SEA universities partners will be equipped of equipment necessary to develop courses and practical work. Workshops and seminars are planned to ensure the relationships between universities and involved stakeholders, as well as to answer the need of labor market.

DOCKSIDE is a structural project between European and Cambodian universities, and the Cambodian Ministry of Education Youth and Sport (MoEYS). It aims to improve the quality of doctoral programs and to increase the research capacity of Khmer Higher Education Institutions (HEI). The key factor of success for this project lies in the scientific multi-disciplinary cooperation on a few specific topics. Along with the booming economy and increased seaborne traffic, the economic consequences of Climate Change and environmental concerns are becoming major issues for the country. Consequently, there is a need for more academic research in these fields. A national network on Environmental and Maritime research (EMR) and an on-line platform of data sharing will be created in this respect. During the second and third year of the project, a summer school will be organized. Students from EU and Cambodia will be offered opportunities to attend various courses taught by international and local professors. The basic principle is to stimulate, organize and exploit all forms of cooperation in research between the participants. DOCKSIDE supports MoEYS in the reform of higher education and restructuring actions for high-standard research. Improving and managing efficiently higher education are the main pillars of this reform. Experts and professors from EU will provide Khmer HEIs with recommendations for syllabus development, innovative research methodologies, e-learning and administrative efficiency of HEIs. Cambodian staff members will learn from the good practices experienced in European institutions. DOCKSIDE will also empower Khmer students through research internships in European universities. EU students will also be involved in the international mobility program by attending the thematic summer schools and participate in traineeships. These two-way exchange opportunities will allow project partners to establish a variety of contacts for future joint-master and PhD programs.

The main aim of the project SIMPLE was to encourage cooperation between the academic sector (HEIs) and the professional sector in the area of agriculture and life sciences in selected Asian countries (Cambodia, Indonesia and Thailand), leading to enhanced employability of the alumni of those universities. The specific objectives were to: (i) support networking and create a sustainable link between young graduates (alumni) and employers by establishing Alumni Centres and Platforms for Cooperation with Professional Sector, (ii) improve the study programme curricula at HEIs in the selected Asian universities by introducing (compulsory) internships leading to more practical knowledge and better professional skills of the alumni, (iii) enhance soft skills of the Asian students, and (iv) to introduce the use of guest lectures from the professional sector as they are an effective and cheap way to connect private world with academic (or start up a connections).Following main activities were running during three years of the project implementation period. Theproject SIMPLE was launched by the official Kick-off Meeting that was held at CULS in October 2016 where all project partners met and set up the strategy plan and terminology for project. The interactive workshop of “Best practices of Alumni Centres” was organised at UGent on 12th – 14th June 2017 and the draft version of the “Guidelines of the best practice examples for Alumni Centres was presented and discussed. The intensive one-week practical training for staff of the Asian Alumni Centres was provided by BOKU together with representatives of the project partners from 9th till 13th October 2017. Thanks to the support of the project, there were established/improved Alumni Centres at the project partners’ universities (new Alumni Centres at RUA and UBB, new Career Centre at KU, Alumni and Career Centre at the Faculty of Natural Resources of PSU, internationalized and improved Alumni Centres at IPB and UNTAD). The Platform for cooperation was established with the cooperation of all project’ partners to ensure sustainable networking between universities and professional sector (involving industry, governmental organisations, chambers of commerce, embassies, NGOs etc.), at the regional and international level. Sixteen Career Days were organized at six partner universities and were evaluated by the EU project partners to improve management aspects of future additional activities such as soft skills, and CV checks. Information about internship opportunities was provided during the Career Days. The organization of internships at project partner universities was improved thanks to the extension of choices, promotion, quality improvement and evaluation. Experience gained during implementation of the project was shared by providing five publications which are available at the project website and which were shared during more than 50 meetings among academic and professional sector. Last not least, soft skills training was both directly and indirectly included during project activities. The project consortium prepared following documents which were broadly shared within the project team and also other stakeholders as multiplication aspect of the project activities: (i) in-depth analysis of experiences with Alumni Centres in Europe was prepared and published as the study “Good Practices of Alumni Centres”, (ii) Action plan for cooperation with the non-academic sector, (iii) Guidelines of best practice examples of Alumni Centres, (iv) models of Internships Forms and Evaluation sheets for implementation of internships, (v) Internship report and (vi) Feasibility Study of Alumni and Career Centres & Platforms for Cooperation with the Professional Sector.

The project focused on the training and building up the capacity of management and governance in order to improve the higher education sector in the involved countries so that it can face the new challenges brought by globalization and the knowledge society. The aim is not only to increase higher education quality and accountability, but also to close the gap with developed and emerging countries. This challenge needs creative and innovative approaches to higher education institutions but also highly motivated, trained and dedicated managers at HEIs. The general objective of the project is to to contribute to the modernization and reform of the management system within HEIs in three Asian countries (MN, VT, CB) and to strengthen the competencies of top and middle managers of these institutions. More specifically, the project aims at introducing Information Management Systems (IMS), upskilling human resource (HR) and financial management staff and facilitating administration and student enrolment processes. Likewise, the project will establish project management offices as an approach to change management through a strategy that addresses the unique challenges of each HEI.The project redefines effective change leadership and management for HEIs where it requires leaders who can facilitate a complex process of transformation – not only in the core higher education activities of learning and teaching, research and engagement but also in how the university operates, in its culture, governance, structure and how it positions itself and supports staff and students. The project will serve as a reference in the country for inclusive leadership education . The project helps to integrate the efforts of a wide variety of players at every level from academia, operations and administration, and help reshape unsupportive or unaligned systems, structures, funding mechanisms, leadership roles and performance indicators.

The MS FSCC project brings five leading Southeast Asian higher education institutions in agriculture and life sciences from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to build a joint master’s degree on the topic of Food Security and Climate Change. These HEIs have been working together within the Southeast Asian University Consortium for Graduate Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC) since 1989 and have a concrete experience of exchanges in Science and Academic programmes but never reached the level of building a joint degree. The MS FSCC was designed on the model of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degrees in Europe. It aimed at responding to acute needs in the professional sector that developed recently, where each individual university may not have all the disciplinary resources to address such topics at the highest (postgraduate) level. This difficulty is generally increased when the professional targets of the learning objectives lead to multidisciplinary orientations of teaching and research. A consortium of universities sharing common learning objectives and organising the mobility of students according to their individual academic strengths was assumed to be in a better position than individual Universities to produce graduates relevant to the market needs. This is the case with Food Security and Climate Change to prepare graduates to work at implementing the commitments of the member countries at the last Paris Conference on Climate Change, while taking into consideration the challenges of food security linked with the recent implementation of the ASEAN integrated market. This corresponds to a new professional challenge in the area of agriculture in SE Asia. The UC has the necessary skills to address this challenge, but individually, none have all the skills needed to properly address the training needs in this domain. Building a joint degree and using mobility to get the best offer in the region may better address that new challenge rather than what they would do individually. Simultaneously with the development of the synopsis of joint MS FSCC programme was the challenge of offering a dual/double degree, an innovation that the UC had never done before. By building common rules to govern within the MS FSCC: exchange/mobility of students, mutual recognition of courses between pairs of Universities within the UC, organisation of summer schools to offer courses to accommodate all students, option to have one semester mobility in Europe to complement the local supply of courses, FSCC-wide quality assurance system recognised by each of the collaborating Universities, and joint evaluation of master thesis between academic teams, Departments, Faculties of the different co-graduating Universities, the UC has experimented agreements that lead to building other post graduate joint programmes, a major institutional innovation in the SE Asian academic world. Whereas building this joint degree was much inspired by the European experience of the Erasmus Mundus programme, it required several adaptations and innovative rules in the participating Universities’ academic systems. These adaptations took more time than initially expected as it had to be accepted in five Universities in parallel and in real practice, for real students, in a real joint programme, and not just in theory. These innovations have been clearly identified, and at least they have been addressed in the case of a first collaborative programme, run with three successive cohorts of students.