UoN participates in the Una Europa Virtual Exchange in Higher Education (UnaVEx) project
The University of Nairobi is one of the three African Universities that are collaborating in the Una Europa Virtual Exchange in Higher Education (UnaVEx) project. This three-year project (March 2024 – Feb 2027) focuses on the co-design and implementation of a virtual exchange framework for sustainability education in an international and intercultural context. It brings together three Una Europa partner universities, the University of Helsinki (UH), Finland (Coordinator), the University of Bologna (UNIBO), Italy, KU Leuven (KUL), Belgium and three African partner universities, the University of Kinshasa (UNIKIN), Democratic Republic of the Congo, the University of Nairobi (UoN), Kenya, and the University of Johannesburg (UJ), South Africa
The project has five work packages coordinated by different Universities, with the University of Helsinki being the principal coordinator.
Work Package (WP) one unites all the Packages (WPs 1-5) under the overarching objective of the UnaVEx project which is to equip students from across the European and Sub-Saharan Region with high-quality sustainability education in an interdisciplinary, international and intercultural context
Work Package 2 (WP2), aims to design an impactful virtual exchange framework for sustainability education and corresponding guidelines, co-designed by European and African scholars. Such a framework specifically seeks to provide guidance to European University Alliances in their international dimension as well as other strategic collaborations of universities active in the field of international sustainability education. In the context of Una Europa, this framework is expected to be taken up both internally within the alliance as well as scaled to collaborations with like-minded partners across other regions world-wide.
Work Package 3 (WP3) focuses on the development of a high-quality training programme, tailored to the specific context of facilitators for sustainability education in interdisciplinary, international and intercultural context.
At its core, Work Package 4 (WP4) focuses on providing high-quality sustainability education to a large number of students from across the six full partner institutions. This project will target a wide range of students at all levels of higher education (Bachelor, Masters and PhD) across both the social sciences and humanities as well as the natural sciences. It aims to not only reach the 2500 students, as foreseen in this project, but ultimately encourage a multiplier effect across other networks with the aim of increasing sustainability awareness in a larger group of students both in Europe and Africa in the long-term.
Work Package 5 (Wp5), focuses on the communication and dissemination aspects, this will not only facilitate the dissemination of project outputs and relevant information but also encourage the upscaling of actions to other higher education partnerships and projects across the globe.
