CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa : social investment, UNESCO

UNESCO´s multi-cultural happening on higher education

jeanne2007 — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:03:00 GMT

This week in Paris UNESCO held one of their biggest conferences on higher education, gathering more than 1,200 thought leaders from around the globe.

The World Conference of Higher Education, or WCHE for short, has been pretty impressive in many ways. Ministers of Education and their delegations as well as academics from universities with multiple different cultural backgrounds discussed how to tackle the biggest challenges of teaching and learning in a more and more global world, taking into account the social, economic and environmental changes.

I remember one of the opening sessions on The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research, where official representatives from China, India, Columbia, Senegal, Egypt and Romania addressed the issues of higher education from their respective backgrounds. Wow, what a variety of insights and experiences we were able to gather in this one session! We clearly realised that globalisation is one of the main drivers changing higher education and, to stay relevant and competitive in a global and rapidly changing marketplace, requires continuous education and training.

Most traditional universities are not designed for these new requirements yet. Information technology plays an increasingly important role in helping universities deal with the pace of change, to offer distance learning opportunities, to help them benefit from social media and cloud computing wherever, however and whenever online curricula and learning services are required.

In one of the keynote presentations, Michael Mendenhall, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer from HP, made it pretty clear that IT is significantly changing the education equation: "The last time we saw such a radical change was when monks writing with quills in monasteries were supplanted by Guttenberg´s printing press".

There are many IT projects out there already that address the new requirements in higher education. For example, in collaboration with UNESCO, HP is working on a project to set up the first e-infrastructure in Africa and the Arab region that will support universities running innovative education projects in their home countries and connecting them with experts from around the world with the help of grid and cloud computing technologies. For more information read our case study.

The UNESCO conference has clearly helped to raise issues, highlight best practices and stimulate expert debate to find solutions for the challenges of the future . I will be excited to see the results and agreed next steps resulting from the conference that will be summarised in a communiqué and published within the next couple of weeks. Let’s stay tuned!

Jeannette Weisschuh, Director Global Citizenship, HP EMEA

New Podcast: Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic from UNESCO talks about partnership on ‘brain drain’

ulrikehaug — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:24:00 GMT

I’d like to invite you to listen to our latest CSR podcast with Stamenka Uvalic-Trumbic from UNESCO. Stamenka works in UNESCO’s Division of Higher Education where she is Chief of the Section for Reform, Innovation and Quality Assurance. She has been involved in the UNESCO/HP private public partnership since 2003, when we launched a pilot programme that focuses on alleviating ‘brain drain’ in South East Europe.

Through this initiative, HP and UNESCO have helped universities in Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia to connect to international research networks with the help of grid-technology. This has allowed the students and faculty to participate in world-class research without having to leave their countries.

I recently met Stamenka at a project meeting where we discussed the extension of our African pilot initiative (which followed the South East Europe project in 2006) to more universities in Africa and the Arab States this year. Not having been with HP during the time of the South East Europe project, I enjoyed learning from Stamenka what worked in this initial project and what didn’t.

Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think about our initiative to connect universities with the help of grid and cloud computing technologies.

Ulrike Haug CSR Stakeholder Programmes

Alleviate Brain Drain in Africa

jeanne2007 — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:59:00 GMT

I would just like to link to an interesting article which provides a good overview of the project “Piloting solutions for reversing brain drain into brain gain for Africa” which is a cooperative project of UNESCO and HP to reduce brain drain in Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe. To read the article, click here. Some time ago, my colleague Arnaud wrote a blog entry about the project; click here to read his entry.

Enjoy reading,

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Global Citizenship, HP EMEA