Agriculture in the Palestinian territories is a mainstay in the economy of both countries. The production of agricultural goods supports the population's sustenance needs and informally employs 90% of the population.On the other side, industrial and/or digital technologies are expanding in global phenomenon with an emphasis on digitalisation, automation, control and robotics in various operations related to soil cultivation management, optimization of crops nutrition, crop tending etc. Automated robotic systems can bring to agriculture flexibility in farmer decision making to select the optimal technological arrangements during the production process of the field crops, which entails not only economic but also the environmental and social aspects.The use of (digital) technologies could allow the agricultural sector to achieve big leaps in Palestine, especially in increasing productivity and introducing the cultivation of new strategic classes of crops. The knowledge about advanced agricultural technologies have therefore become key for the farmers in these regions, throughout the process of cultivation and harvest. Precision agriculture is an innovative concept in the countries of Middle East and especially in Palestine. This is not specifically about the technologies, but about the overall concept putting accent on understanding how the technologies can make the farming more accurate and controlled. The innovative character of the project serves not only the capacity-building aspect for Palestinian HEIs, but also addresses the challenges faced by the EU countries regarding ICT, technological developments, and creating a global research framework for innovation and development regarding the integration of newest (digital) technologies into agriculture and rural development.

The complexity of nutrition as a discipline and practice tends to be overlooked; doctors, nurses and community health workers need specific preparation or guidance to deliver the nutrition services that health facilities are expected to deliver. When nutrition professionals are unavailable for field programs, international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) may hire other workers, whose nutrition competencies may be highly variable. Studies on nutrition workforce capacity conducted in Palestine confirm the severe shortage of skilled clinical nutrition professionals. In addition, because of a shortage of nutritionists, the bulk of the nutrition interventions were done by health workers who lacked the skills to provide quality nutrition services.This project aims to enhance the clinical nutrition practice in Palestine and its role in the medical care process and has successfully achieved the following outputs:1. Assessment of academic and professional needs2. Training of academic staff and professionals and mobilization to European partner institutes3. Preparation of Clinical Nutrition manual 4. Development of Arabic food analyzer software5. Developing of Clinical Nutrition curricula 6. Development of food and nutrition laboratories7. Exposing best local students to EU reaching environment.At the longer run, the project has accomplished the following results:1. Reduced gap between academia and practical clinical nutrition sector2. Turning the focus of the stakeholders onto clinical nutrition as a component of health care process3. Knowledge and skill transfer to local nutrition workforce4. Raised community awareness towards nutrition knowledge and practice5. Networking with international academic and professional bodies

The HiCure project seeks to build capacities to develop an integrated curricula in Health Informatics as pathways within the undergraduate degrees of the faculties of Health and Information Technology, using a student-centred adaptive learning approach based on the bologna processes. It aims to develop two pathways, integrated within the current curricula, to bring continuity and achieve harmony across the programmes. The project will develop 12 courses in total. Each pathway will include eight courses, four of these courses will be common across the two pathways, while four of each of the eight courses will be unique to each pathway. These two pathways will be deployed at the four participating partner universities, two in Palestine (P1: BZU, P3:HU) and two in Jordan (P4:JUST, P5:HaU). The uniqueness of this approach, that to meet the multidisciplinary needs of the two domains, it will develop an innovative user-centred adaptive learning to create an integrated curricula and enable the four universities to integrate the new developed courses within their degrees addressing variations, yet meeting their own specified key learning outcomes. The importance of Health Informatics to be part of the undergraduate training as integral part of their educational skills, is critical to advance the health domain towards evidence-based practices, in the region, which is currently almost non-existent. These skills are essential to solidify the deeper understanding of the value and importance of health informatics not only to their speciality, but also their profession, work and practice. They will promote the uptake and implementation of health information systems to become essential part of their profession as enabling mechanisms to improve the quality of health. Thus one key objective of HiCure is to develop capacity of members of faculty in Health Informatics and create undergraduate pathways to ensure sustainability and lasting impact.

Despite numerous initiatives to upgrade the quality of the teaching profession in Palestine in recent years, there have been none that have led to a complete holistic reform of BA Primary Education degree programmes to reflect international practice. This project addresses this need by adopting a systemic, holistic approach to quality reform of all elements of BA Primary Education degree programmes in participating universities in the Gaza Strip and West Bank of Palestine. This involves the total reconceptualization of the programmes to include the adoption of an extended Practicum Field Experience in line with international practice and the renewal of courses so that they are linked explicitly to Practicum and support student teachers to develop a range of 21st century pedagogical skills; leading to a new generation of teachers who are able to transform teaching and learning in Palestinian classrooms. The programmes include clearly defined pathways that focus on developing capacity in identified needs within Palestinian education; namely, Technology Enhanced Teaching Learning and Assessment (TELTA) and Diversity, Inclusion and SEN (DISEN). Programme development is supported by a capacity building programme in higher education pedagogy that focuses upon supporting academic staff to adopt modern, student-centred, interactive teaching approaches and strategies and use technology effectively to support and enhance learning, teaching and assessment. A parallel programme in research capacity building empowers academic staff to research their practices and draw upon these to inform on-going improvement of the programmes. These initiatives are underpinned by the establishment of well-equipped technology enhanced learning environments consisting of tailor-made digital learning platforms based on Google Apps for Education (GAFE), and a Smart Learning Room in each university that supports the movement from traditional to transformational ways of learning and teaching.

According to scientific research, refugees have a higher risk of suffering physical and mental illnesses compared to the general population (Bogic, Njoku & Priebe, 2015). The consequences of such situations are even more severe for children (Fazel et al, 2012; Reed et al, 2012), and they include neurodevelopmental problems (Turley & Obrzut, 2012; Zaydeh et al, 2016). The effects and consequences of neurodevelopmental problems caused by the exposure to traumatic events, violence or malnourishment (Fasfous et al, 2013; Thabet et al, 2004) develop during childhood and adolescence and spread throughout life affecting academic performance, professional status and mental health during adulthood (Shonkoff, 2011, 2012). The largest number of refugees living in regions around Europe are located in the Middle East, specifically in Palestine and Jordan (Gonzalez-Ubeda, 2017). There are more than 2 million people living in refugee camps in Palestine. Moreover, 700,000 Syrians and 2 million Palestinian refugees are living in Jordan (almost 40% of the total population) (González-Úbeda, 2017). Nevertheless, professionals who provide care to refugee children (principally psychologists, social workers, and teachers) have limited or lacking training on neurodevelopment and its related problems. For these reasons, the main objective of this Project is to design and implement a higher diploma about neurodevelopment focused on refugee children for professionals who are involved in their care. This higher diploma will include units about brain and neuropsychological development, detection of neuropsychological problems, instruments for detection, etc. Objectives and sustainability will be achieved by means of qualifying academic staff on neurodevelopment as well as instructing them on becoming the future teachers of the diploma. Training will be supported by both online learning tools and personal training.