Announcements

Reaching Across Borders: Building a More Equitable World Through Higher Education

Pranav Chintalapati, Chemical and Biological Engineering, UBC; Nancy Gallini, Academics Without Borders | Economics, UBC; Arash Habibi Lashkari, Information Technology, York University; Peter Keller, Geography, SFU; and Bob Woollard, Family Practice, UBC

Coach House, Green College, UBC and livestreamed Wednesday, March 19, 5-6:30 pm

This series engages with the critical question of what role public universities should occupy in international sustainable development, particularly informed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by all Member States, including Canada, in 2015. As the UN explains, the SDGs “are an urgent call for action by all countries—developed and developing—in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth—all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.” To better understand what is at stake with this question, conveners of this series will stage a series of conversations with people working on the front lines of university global engagement. The first three events of the series will be centred on personal stories and experiences generated from the work of three organizations with permanent, satellite, or temporary homes at UBC: the Neglected Global Diseases Initiative, the Scholars at Risk program, and Academics Without Borders. In the fourth and final event, panelists will revisit the larger question of the ethics and risks of university engagement in international partnerships and around a common cause, as well as discuss what it looks like to build capacity, what it means to develop a sense of global citizenship, as what they see as the current and future challenges and limitations of this kind of work.

Series Conveners: Nancy Gallini, Academics Without Borders; Natasha Nobell, Scholars at Risk UBC; and Kishor M. Wasan, Neglected Global Diseases Initiative.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.3 calls for equal access for all to “affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university” by 2030. At current rates of participation, achieving that goal appears to be remote. In this public event, we ask: What leadership role can we—at post- secondary institutions in Canada—play in helping our partner institutions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) provide local quality education that otherwise would not be available to their youth? In recognition of recent budgetary challenges faced by Canadian institutions of higher education, Academics Without Borders (AWB) proposes an effective way to give Canadian institutions a leadership role in this area.

AWB is a Canadian nonprofit, founded in 2007, with a mission to assist LMICs in improving their institutions of higher education across the full range of activities, from expanding and improving existing curricula, degree programs, and institutions, to helping create new ones. AWB fulfills its mission by providing volunteer experts— faculty and staff from AWB’s Network of 35 colleges and universities across Canada—opportunities to work on projects that are proposed, developed, and sustained by post-secondary partners in LMICs. Thus far, AWB has conducted over 200 projects with over 100 partner institutions in nearly 40 countries with over 300 volunteers. This event will present an overview of AWB and feature two recent projects on strengthening engineering research in Uganda and on creating a new liberal arts university in Nepal, presented by AWB volunteers from UBC, SFU, and York.

AWB is grateful to the University of British Columbia for its leadership as Host institution of AWB’s Network, to its fellow Network universities and colleges across Canada, to the extraordinary AWB volunteers for their commitment to global higher education, and to Green College for the opportunity to highlight Academics Without Borders and our collective work.

Academics Without Borders/Universitaires sans frontières (AWB) is pleased to announce that the University of British Columbia will be AWB’s host institution for the next three years.  We are deeply grateful to UBC for their leadership, and to McMaster University for serving as host institution for the past five years.

AWB, a Canada-based, volunteer-driven non-profit organization that connects academics in the developed world with colleges and universities in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), helps to strengthen and expand higher education through capacity-building projects.   Importantly, all projects are initiated by the partner institutions, ensuring that faculty, staff and students fully engage in their projects and to sustain the results long-term.  The projects span the full range of post-secondary research, teaching and service activities such as helping to design curriculum for a Medical Physics program at the Meru University of Science and Technology in Kenya, developing support services for students with disabilities at the State Islamic University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and coaching faculty in effective graduate student supervision at Uganda’s Mbarara University of Science and Technology.

“AWB is honoured to collaborate with UBC as our host institution.  UBC has a deep commitment to international partnerships, as reflected in the impactful and diverse research and teaching activities by UBC’s faculty and students in the developing world.  Among its many leadership roles, UBC was the first university in Canada to develop a strategy under the Global Access Principles to facilitate global access to its technologies in the area of health and protection of the environment,” said Nancy Gallini, AWB’s Executive Director.  “Through this collaboration between AWB and UBC, the entire AWB Network of universities and colleges is strengthened in their commitment to knowledge-sharing with colleagues in LMIC post-secondary institutions, according to their expressed needs and priorities.”

UBC Provost and Vice-President Academic, Gage Averill, explains that this partnership aligns well with the University’s prominent orientation to global issues. “UBC’s engagement with the AWB Network is a meaningful expression of our shared belief that universities can be an important force in promoting global advancement by collaborating with our partner institutions of higher education in the developing world as they strive to increase the capacity and quality of their programs,” he says. “UBC is proud to serve as the host institution for AWB for the next three years, and we extend our thanks to past host, McMaster University, for their deep commitment to promoting the role of higher education in global development over the past five years.”