IMPACT-HE - Capacity building for synergies, impact assessment and management of international higher education cooperation funds

IMPACT HE is a structural project that aims to enable diverse African universities as strong local development agents, enhancing their capacity to contribute to sustainable development, drive development cooperation agendas, shape policy and partner with EU universities in pursuit of common development goals. It responds to the question of how to ensure mutually beneficial partnerships and builds on the fact that many EU development agencies now promote the concept of ‘de-colonizing’ HE in their programmes. The Specific Objectives are:1: To enhance the capacities of African universities in Kenya and Ethiopia - two pilot countries - to manage and coordinate international development cooperation funds and projects, ensuring deeper institutional and societal impacts;2: To reinforce internal project monitoring mechanisms and structures in African universities, linked to their own quality culture, data collection capacity and ability to strategically assess impact;3: To provide a platform and a framework to map and assess different development cooperation funds and projects in the HE sector, to better align them, trace cumulative impacts and inspire synergies at national and regional level in Africa;4: To engage African policy makers, HEI and EU agencies in joint policy development and impact assessment, in pursuit of impactful and mutually beneficial development cooperation. The project will entail a mapping of different development cooperation at the level of the African countries and HEI, a training programme for enhanced project management and monitoring, the development of ‘Societal Impact Reports”, and the creation of national platforms for international development cooperation projects and in HE and research.IMPACT HE is scale-able, with its approach and products being sustained and possibly further replicated in other African countries. It will also inspire “Team Europe’ approaches between development cooperation organisations and agencies in the EU.