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January 2011
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Edulink and a new way of seeing
The project was funded by in the ACP-EU Cooperation programme in Higher Education (EDULINK) and was meant to train members of higher education institutions (HEIs) in the art of resource mobilization. Recognising that global education budgets were shrinking even as the number of HEIs was growing, the idea was to provide relevant and needed skills for them to achieve sustainable growth. Overall, the aim was to help HEIs to diversify their incomes and thus become self-reliant, to learn fund-raising strategies, to commercialise research, how to properly apply for grants, and develop business within the parameters of a university. A project of this type is a first for The UWI, and with staff learning all these new skills in a structured manner, and being taught how to spread the knowledge, the ripple effect will be enough to create a culture shift that will transform the way the university supports itself. Joy Cooblal, the project coordinator, is confident that research capacity will improve as participants have discovered untraditional ways of funding through exploring a wider community of donors through private citizens and organisations. The whole business of resource management has taken about 20 years to take root in universities, and it came about as it became clear that universities had to change their strategies if they wanted to survive in the increasingly competitive environments. “Everyone is looking for creative ways to market what they are doing at the tertiary education level,” said Cooblal. As she enumerated the benefits of the programme, especially the resource mobilisation, which was “new, in the sense that it is now being professionalised,” she said, but it is something the university has to do continuously. The 35 trained trainees from UWI, who received joint certificates from The UWI, EU and ACP, will now go back into their respective organisations and pass on their lessons to colleagues, so it is an ongoing project in that sense. The UWI was leader of this particular project, partnering with The University of Technology, Jamaica, The University of Mauritius, The University of Suriname, The University of Guyana, The University of Belize, The University of the South Pacific and the University of Warwick. All of these institutions belong to the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states and the 15 EU member states that are signatories to the 9th European Development Fund. The project could have run a bit longer than two years, said Cooblal, saying that various stakeholders have had the same comment in trying to meet the project timelines. One of the biggest challenges arose because of distance among partners and not all of the participating HEIs had access to the level of technology required to make interactive communication feasible. Through Moodle, they found common ground to store and locate documents and programmes. “You need to have everything up and running,” she said, “all the technology must work. Ideally, we should have had smoother interaction using the Virtual Office as not all partners had equal access to bandwidth and equipment and we had to find alternate ways.” However, she said this was part of the learning process that helped them to prepare for the next time. “It didn’t happen for this project, but hopefully it will in the future.” The best outcome is that it has reshaped ways of thinking, to the extent that even the UWI Fete (the largest contributor to the UWI Development and Endowment Fund since its inception in 1991) has been used as a model for fund-raising initiatives. With fresh eyes, new strategies, and a committed team dedicated to spreading the word, the Professional Development Programme coming out of this EDULINK project is far from over. |
In December 2010, an Edulink programme was being wound up. The official part of the project, “Capacity Building for the Financial Sustainability of ACP Higher Education Institutions,” had ended, but those involved accepted that now the classroom sessions were over, and the trainers had been trained, it had really just begun.