Major changes are needed to develop sustainable agricultural and food systems in Vietnam, Philippines and Sri Lanka as large proportion of these countries agricultural growth has stemmed from expanded or more intensive use of land and other natural resources, and relatively heavy use of fertilizer and other agro-chemicals increasing the risk of residues in food. Agroecology could be an important approach to meet this general objective - sustainable agricultural and food systems, - as it designs, develops, and promotes the transition towards biodiversity and low external input-based, socially sound farming and food systems. Thus, the CDAE project will create a new MSc programme in a specialized academic area and key regulatory/policy issue, namely “Agroecology” that is as much absent from Partner HEI graduate and postgraduate programmes as it is needed, address this absence and the needs of the region and incorporate ecological principles and knowledge into the study of cropping and farming systems so that professionals are well prepared for the future design and management of a sustainable agriculture and organic farming techniques. In addition, the “Agroecology Labs” that will be established in the participating universities will promote sustainable agriculture and will act as foci of research innovation and cooperation in the area. Moreover, the Agroecology Knowledge Hubs will be a powerful tool for the initial and continued training of the students and academics and will be used in combination with the Labs to ensure continued research cooperation among European and Asian HEIs as well as updating the staff’s knowledge and skills.

"ANTENA is a structural project that aims to increase the academic quality and research of universities in the Philippines through the development of internationalisation capacities. The ANTENA project will first of all consolidate the Internationalisation structure and build human capacities of 10 HEIs by means of targeted training programmes. Secondly ANTENA will accompany the governance reforms of CHED and enhance international networking through strategic actions in key areas of the Philippine higher education system.The ANTENA project will achieve the above-mentioned objectives by: 1. Increased inter-institutional cooperation and sharing of good practices via the needs analysis and Institutional Building: 1 Study Need Analysis of Internationalisation produced, 2 site visits to UA&UM workshops for Top and Managerial staff implemented and 10 IROs fully equip and ruining;2. Strengthening of Internationalisation of higher education system through the promotion of HEIs governance reforms. 2 National Round tables carried out (One by CHED), Internationalisation Strategic Plans developed for 10 HEIs in the Philippines and the drafting of a ""Policy Roadmap for the implementation of strategies on the Internationalisation of Philippines HE"" under the leadership of the Ministry-CHED;3. Enhancement of managerial and administrative staff capacities in dealing with internationalisation issues: set of 6 comprehensive training materials developed and 2 training completed. 20 replication workshops conducted and ready to be implemented by non-partners HEIs in the Philippines;4. Establishment of a National Network and conducting 2 Philippines Internationalisation of Higher Education Conferences, and promoting the participation of the ANTENA Network in higher education international events;5. Increase public awareness and understanding of Internationalisation within higher education institutions."

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.