Inspired by the EU funded network of ‘Higher Education Reform Experts’ (HERE), the South African Association of Technical Universities (SATN) and 6 of its members, in cooperation with European partners, is launching and piloting a similar network in SA, comprised of two academic leaders from each partner university. The ‘HERE SA’ are strategically selected given their roles in overseeing and guiding teaching and learning strategies and with potential to be catalysts for change in the HE sector. The HERESA project will train and capacitate these individuals, enabling them to train other peers at the management level and to contribute to holistic higher education development to meet labour market and societal needs. The network will be instrumental, in the first instance, in supporting the SATN members to refine and revise their institutional strategies for teaching and learning. These key areas are: 1) strengthening governance and university leadership, particularly related to teaching and learning, 2) innovative curricula development, oriented towards the fourth industrial revolution (4IR), competence-based learning (CBL) and work integrated learning (WIL), and 3) entrepreneurship education in collaboration with industry partners. Technical assistance will be provided by EU partners from Italy, France, Sweden, Finland, Spain and Ireland, to support the SA partner universities to implement these strategies and train staff. In addition to facilitating cooperation, exchange of practice and training around these issues and advancing strategy development, the SA HERE network will be expanded at the end of the project and become an important dialogue partner with the Council for Higher Education (CHE) and a means to connect policy and practice more pragmatically and systematically in South Africa.

The ELEPHANT consortium consists of 6 SA and 2 EU HEIs that shar expertise and apply a transversal multidisciplinary holistic approach to empower research capacity in a One Health (OH) approach. Being reference for specific activities, participant’s leadership and responsibility for design and implementation of OH teaching will be enhanced. Creation of a virtual research platform aims at sustaining project information, OH educational and research results and practices and communication also beyond the project period and allows other SA or SADC Universities to share knowledge and expertise and values such as: Legal compliance, ethics, research integrity, inclusiveness.The involvement of associate partners shows connection with, and impact on society, through demand driven research and knowledge transfer, to communities, industry and policy makers.SA participants will improve their quality in teaching and research (training) by enforcing capacities in terms of better equipped laboratories, standardized methodologies and continuous interactions, within and beyond the project period, with all staff of other partners and graduate students. This will positively impact evidence based One Health interventions to improve health and welfare of animals and humans Ultimately, the SA HE institutions will improve their reputation in research by increasing publication numbers in high ranked scientific journals. Their impact on society will be focused especially towards policy makers by sharing data and strategies to put in place science based, and One Health focused, hazards (disease and pollutant) surveys, prevention and intervention/control and a reduction in the wildlife-livestock conflicts. The project will largely involve communities that will be engaged in participatory OH activities, and will benefit from increased hazard awareness and control. The latter to be facilitated in collaboration with industry.

The project aims to build capacity to internationalise and transform higher education curricula by broadening student participation in the internationalisation process. The project is key as institutions are not prepared for curriculum internationalisation, which will become mandatory in the near future, particularly as physical student mobility is unable to reach a sufficient number of students in South Africa.iKUDU will develop and effect strategies to guide curriculum internationalisation through Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) virtual exchanges. COIL is a novel teaching and learning initiative that advances global competencies across shared multicultural learning environments using Internet-based tools and online pedagogies. Students in two countries use electronic communication to work jointly through virtual exchange. Noteworthy is the intentional development of intercultural communicative competence amongst staff and students. Working with a peer in another country, the lecturer facilitates the competencies and skills necessary to live and work in a multicultural, interconnected world through COIL virtual exchanges. The project will train 55 teaching staff to become experts in curriculum internationalisation and transformation, and COIL virtual exchange. They will be equipped to train additional COIL virtual exchange experts. During the project’s lifespan, 55 sustainable COIL virtual exchanges will be developed with European partner universities, in which 2625 South African students will partake.The impact of the project will be that all students at partner institutions will benefit from internationalised and transformed curricula. The 55 trained COIL virtual exchange experts, who will be competent to train future cohorts, will be a critical mass to ensure that in the longer term a substantive part of the student population at South African partner universities will be able to access international exposure through COIL virtual exchanges.

BECOME will use UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs) as model systems to understand how to manage synergies and trade-offs between conservation objectives and human development, through pluralistic and inclusive landscape-scale approaches to conservation. BECOME will take an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach, combining diverse methodologies for evaluating effectiveness of BR management in supporting conservation and biocultural diversity. BECOME will harness existing data resources and infrastructure, including longitudinal governance and biodiversity data, to analyze BR effectiveness across temporal and spatial scales. The project will contribute to the implementation of global and national policy frameworks towards the conservation of biological diversity by generating actionable knowledge. The research design will specifically account for priority areas of the new post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity. BECOME is uniquely positioned to perform much-needed longitudinal research on BR effectiveness across different metrics. BECOME will go beyond evaluating BR effectiveness through actors' self-evaluations, to help reduce bias and develop common methods to facilitate both compliance monitoring and adaptive management learning outcomes. BECOME will use existing data infrastructure to analyze changing trends in over 100 BRs worldwide whose management approaches have been followed for over 10 years, to understand changes in effectiveness. We will then harness big-data approaches to understand changes in land-use and modeled biodiversity change. The long-term monitoring of ecological and social variables performed in BECOME will help provide rare longitudinal trends related to social-ecological change and effectiveness of BRs. We will investigate the effectiveness of the zonation system as a combined “land-sharing” and “land-sparing” approach, to understand how this system supports biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of landscape resources. In addition to longitudinal studies supported by governance and big-data infrastructure, we will use case studies to take a mixed-methods approach to evaluate management and context-dependent meanings and measures of BR success, both present and future. BECOME will explore the potential of combining intergenerational practice with participatory scenario planning, collaborating with BR stakeholders to explore desired futures in BRs which work for biodiversity and people. BECOME will work with stakeholders to capture and develop context-dependent but generalizable metrics which are adapted to BR objectives, facilitate the adaptive co-management learning feedback loop, and reflect synergies between conservation and development objectives. By evaluating both process and outcomes of BR implementation, BECOME will help to capture the complexity of social-ecological phenomena while encouraging learning through participatory transdisciplinary processes.