Egypt’s population is growing rapidly, yet natural resources like water and land suitable for habitation and agriculture are limited while others like renewable energy sources are not yet readily accessible. Therefore, the “Sustainable Development Strategy: Egypt’s Vision 2030” was developed by the Egyptian Government to prepare for the social and economic consequences. It includes challenging goals and targets in areas like land reclamation, agriculture and food processing as well as research, technology development and higher education. These goals can only be met, if new holistic approaches are being pursued that embrace the latest technological developments and are both sustainable and interdisciplinary. Feedback from stakeholders of the quadruple helix of producers and industry, universities, policy makers and society, clearly demonstrates a need for specialists in “Sustainable Resources Management” who have a generalist background in uncertainty prediction and different fields of sciences, like ecology and environmental sciences as well as engineering, including civil, water, electric, electronic and agricultural engineering. They need to be able to plan, set up, maintain and optimise complex systems like aquaponics farms and automated ground water pump systems that are both PV driven and connected to the grid. Thus far, cross cutting study programs are plainly focused on agricultural graduates, while appropriate offers for engineers and environmental scientists are missing. This limits progress and restricts technological optimisation and long term environmental effect prediction. Therefore, this project will develop an interdisciplinary study program, offering MSc and advanced diplomas in Sustainable Resources Management. It will focus on crosscutting issues, employ the latest learning methodologies and address technical as well as social and skills, required to implement sustainable technical solution to the challenges in food production and processing.

Egypt SDGs Agenda for 2030, aiming to build up collaborative channels between EG HEIs and local, regional and global organizations for the implementation of the SDGs, enhance the innovation skills of students, use technology to develop a system of gathering, monitoring and reporting data to enforce implementation of the UN SDGs, create programs involving SDGs awareness and agenda, and motivate funding organizations to continuously modernize and finance the EG HEIs.INVOLVE is aiming at strengthening the role of the Egyptian Universities in the achievement of the environmental Sustainable Development Goals “SDGs” through enhancing their organizational governance capacities, creating current and future SDGs implementers, and upgrading their operational facilities necessary to the implementation of innovative practices for the achievement of the environmental SDGs for better climate change management. This will be expressed by the outputs of the project; Sustainable Development Center in EG HEIs providing knowledge and skills of SDGs, environmental SDGs Videos and Booklets, University wide module on Sustainable Development, trained EG staff in EU, updated EG HEIs strategic plans in the context of SDGs, official decrees in EG HEIs integrating environmental SDGs in their daily operations, and mobile equipment for environmental measurements leading to environmentally sustainable Campuses in EG HEIs.

Egyptian emigrants to the big cities or crossing the Mediterranean to Europe are most often young men belonging to rural rather than urban areas. Migrants and refugees move to Europe driven from their country of origin (“push factors”) and because they are drawn to Europe (“pull factors”). The challenge to be addressed in this project is reducing the number of people seeking to leave the countryside or their countries due to the lack of attractive prospects. In Egypt, agriculture and rural regions clearly remain a source of resilience for many families in the face of economic shocks. This project supports the Egyptian rural-community with the necessary qualified graduates and university expertise to improve agricultural productivity, enable more sustainable food production, develop the poor villages, enhance farmers’ income and their living conditions to prevent migration to cities or abroad. The project has five specific objectives that can be summarized as follows: 1. To identify the push factors for migration from rural communities and identify the needed qualifications to support rural development. 2. Modification and re-orientation of the existing post- and undergraduate curricula to supply the market with graduates who contribute in the implementation of the country’s sustainable development vision and ensure the sustainable rural development. 3. Establishing four DeVilage Service Offices at the four Egyptian universities to provide technical support for the farmers and public and private sectors. 4. To develop a capacity building programme to train and equip the professors in the Egyptian universities with the knowledge and tools to address the different dimensions of sustainable agriculture and rural development.5. To develop Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as Open Education Resources (OER) for spreading the knowledge and raising the awareness of different stakeholders.

The Middle East and North African region has faced one of the most critical refugee crises, with global consequences, especially for EU. Egypt has received more than 400,000 refugees from Syria alone with 30,000 of them being of school age and only 50% enrolled in public schools. While Syrian refugee children are allowed to enroll in public schools, the majority go to refugee schools organized by the Syrian community, since Egyptian teachers lack skills to tackle the needs of refugee learners. Refugee children are a unique learner group due to their prior traumatic experiences. There is need of a pedagogy focusing on refugees that most teachers, even refugee ones, do not possess. Refugee teachers in Egypt, estimated to 4,000, face considerable constraints in accessing certified in-service training. NGOs and other organizations have gone some way to addressing refugee children’s schooling, but their interventions are very limited and not tied to educational pathways that lead to certified lasting programs. Both Egyptian and refugee teachers should undergo training to gain awareness of the refugee experience as well as the cultural backgrounds of refugee learners so that they can be responsive to refugee needs and sensitive to trauma reactions. These problems and challenges could be tackled through the development of an innovative in-service teacher certification program enabled by blended learning, established in the faculties of education. ReTeCp responds to a cross-cutting priority by giving access to refugee teachers to the Egyptian HEIs through a post-graduate diploma focusing on these issues. By the end of ReTeCp project, about 700 teachers, including refugee teachers will be trained and in the next 4-6 years years all refugee teachers and an increasing number of Egyptian teachers will be undergoing life-long certified training that will highly contribute to the right of refugee children for quality education (SDG4) in the host countries.

Climate projections for the Middle East and North African (MENA) region indicate warmer and drier conditions with increased frequency of natural disasters. Agriculture is one of the most vulnerable economic sectors to climate change, mainly due to the limited availability of water and land resources in the two target MENA countries (Egypt and Jordan). There is future risk of higher skills shortages in ‘niche’ areas related to the impact of climate change to agricultural sectors and food production. In particular, there is need for highly specialised scientists in the field of agriculture and food security who want to combine scientific and social or policy skills to better understand and make significant contributions to climate adaptation and mitigation in agriculture and food security. It is critical to integrate agricultural science with related subjects that impact on sustainability and food security such as geo-politics, legislation and regulation, consumer pressures, economics, agro-ecology and environmental stewardship, especially at the post-graduate level. An inter/multidisciplinary MSc programme in Climate Change, Agricultural Development and Food Security (CCSAFS) is urgently needed. CCSAFS is driven by the Bologna process and a multi-stakeholder approach advanced through a participatory or negotiated curriculum, innovative methodologies such as the 10Cs transversal skills in a problem-based learning environment enabled by ICTs, blended learning, SDGs and agro-food entrepreneurship in teaching, learning and outreach activities. Graduates will be equipped with interdisciplinary knowledge and agro-food entrepreneurship and ethics to promote sustainable agricultural production, food security and climate change adaptation. CCSAFS will help to overcome the threats to agriculture and food security in a changing climate, exploring new ways of helping vulnerable rural communities to compact hunger and adjust to local, regional and global changes in climate.