"With the capacity building project ""DigiUGov"", the project partners aim to make a significant contribution to an inclusive digital transformation at universities in Colombia, Mexico and Europe. By supporting (early stage) researchers, digital teaching and research will be strengthened locally, internationally connected and finally consolidated through the establishment of corresponding structures and governance mechanisms at the participating institutions. With the same objective, the digitalizationof the university administration will be promoted through international exchange and adequate consultation formats. Science managers and representatives of the various status groups at the participating universities are being recognised as key players and their competences are being strengthened. The systematic engagement of civil society actors and relevant companies in the exchange formats and in the implementation projects ensures that the project goals set are accurately and that they can be adapted to the needs of the situation during the project. The capacity-building goal of the project is to enable the establishment of sustainable structures at the partner institutions by involving and activating these groups and through pilot projects."

Cities and regions in Europe (EU) and Community of Latin American & Caribbean States (CELAC) face shared and urgent global-local challenges to integrate practical actions with strategies to achieve greater inclusion, biodiversity, climate change adaptation and environmental quality. Many cities share problems of landscape fragmentation caused by rapid growth, urban sprawl and economic restructuring. Poorly planned urbanisation leaves a legacy of cities lacking the green areas needed for ecosystems to provide the services essential to human life. Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have the potential to help reverse these trends, and our combined EU-CELAC palette of socio-cultural, ecological and governance contexts represents a huge opportunity to move forward - faster, together. CONEXUS will co-produce, structure and promote access to the shared, contextualised knowledge needed to support cities and communities to co-create NBS, and to restore urban ecosystems, to help drive the required step-change in urban policy and practice in EU and CELAC countries. It adopts a planetary health perspective: healthy landscapes and ecosystems are vital to support human life, and humanity must restore, create and care for these landscapes and ecosystems in a reciprocal, ongoing and iterative relationship. This transdisciplinary project uses nature-based thinking (NBT) to bring together community, private, public and research partners to meet this challenge, and experiments with novel co-production methods to deliver NBS innovations in ‘Life-Lab’ pilots. The project’s core concept is to co-create context-appropriate NBS for ecosystems restoration and sustainable urbanisation in CELAC and EU cities, using a place-based approach (place-making, place-keeping and place-prescribing), solving problems together with citizens. The CONEXUS cities are: in CELAC - São Paulo, Bogotá, Santiago and Buenos Aires; and in the EU - Lisbon, Barcelona and Turin.

By developing this project, the consortium aims to contribute for the resolution of several challenges, such as unemployment among young graduates; difficulties to attract private funds to research; the academics' needs for constant pedagogical skills update; difficulties to promote the transference of knowledge; the difficulty to attract students from social disadvantaged classes and mantain them; the need to promote entrepreneur minds to contribute to decrease economic and social crisis; the use of crowdsourcing as a tool to create a network; the difficulty of attracting users from different regions and finally, the need to improve students' career guidance.In order to achieve the purposed goals, were defined three core activities: the platform development, where different stakeholders will be connected; the platform room to promote its use; and the entrepreneurship, crowdsourcing and employability stakeholders' training to help them to improve these skills and create opportunities through the use of the platform.

The project enhances the quality of Colombian, Cuban and Panamanian universities by transferring the EU expertise to design and implement a quality referential (framework, tools & methodology) based on impact assessment. This tool complements the actual QA systems currently limited to quality of teaching and research. This fosters an evolution towards an impact-driven culture in the institutions which improves the quality and relevance of the services that they provide to their community. The project results in an impact QA system, inspired by EU experience and customized to the 3 national contexts. The HEIs are capacitated for applying the quality referential at the institutional level (impact is measured and included in strategic development) and at the functional level (more activities/projects are targeted at local communities and their impact is maximized). The fitness for purpose and practical relevance of this QA system are verified by its implementation in 11 universities, under the mentorship of European experts.Results and best practices are compiled in two publications series: one for senior university management explaining how to measure, monitor and increase impact and collecting best practices. The second series, for faculty and specialist staff, provides guidelines and inspiration on how to maximize impact of universities activities for local environment and illustrates it it by a case studies compendium. Main findings and recommendations are shared with the 3 countries stakeholders during the project conference to build awareness and stimulate replication.The project promotes cultural changes in the universities who understand better how to answer the needs of their environment how to engage into innovative and more impactful activities. Regional & local communities benefit from the concrete results of the pilot projects and tighten their links with HEIs open to the local environment.

Four peripheral small and medium size cities (SMSCs) - Cordoba (Spain), Riga (Latvia), Lucca (Italy) and Nitra (Slovakia) – will take the leadership to test visionary and integrated solutions to foster Inclusive Health and Wellbeing (IHW) in SMSCs with a focus on gender and diversity. IN-HABIT visionary approach consists on the innovative mobilization of existing undervalued resources (culture, food, human-animal bonds and environment) to increase IHW. The integrated approach is based on the combination of technological, digital, nature based, cultural, and social innovations in selected urban public spaces. These solutions will be co-designed, co-deployed and co-managed with and by local stakeholders. The effects on mental health, wellbeing and healthier lifestyles of these solutions will be evaluated and a sound scalable evidence-base and monitoring framework delivered. A systemic urban planning framework will be developed based on innovative gender and diversity approaches to boost IHW that will represent a unique reference for SMSCs. IN-HABIT will base its actions on underserved areas and vulnerable target groups existing in each city (such as, children, elders, women, persons with disabilities, ethnic minorities), and on the integration of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ visionary solutions articulated around heritage and culture (as a nexus for inclusive societies), food (nurturing daily healthier lifestyles), animals (human-animal bonds as new relational urban goods) and art and environment (to connect places and people). Bogotá city will share know-how and replicate experiences. These actions have attracted the interest to be replicated by other twin-cities and networks of cities, that have shown their interest in establishing synergies with IN-HABIT and replicating actions. IN-HABIT is an ambitious but achievable project in the 5 years lifetime proposed.