January 29, 1999 Volume II,
Issue 1
In this issue...
• Pending expected USAID budget allocations, ALO intends to announce its 1999 Request for Proposals for Institutional Partnerships some time after mid-February. Watch the ALO Web site for the most updated information at http://www.aascu.org/alo.
• AACC now has 11 Workforce Development partnerships in progress.
• Summaries of each operational partnership are on-line at http://www.aascu.org/alo/work. •
For two decades, Prince George’s Community College (PGCC) has been meeting the challenge of educating a disadvantaged population without ready access to education through distance learning in Maryland. Now, with the help of a grant from the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) and ALO with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), PGCC is collaborating with a South African university to help it meet its own post- apartheid and access to education challenges.
The project, entitled “Net\Work: An Information Technology Workforce Development Partnership,” is designed to enhance the capacity of Vista University in South Africa to educate and train a large population that for many years has been economically, socially and politically disadvantaged.
Successful workforce development requires that students be able to function in a workplace increasingly dependent on information technology. However, those with the ability to teach these skills have often been unwilling to travel to remote areas because of a lack of economic incentives, or because of perceived risks or the legacy of ethnic animosity. With the help of its PGCC colleagues, Vista University will soon reach students on seven campuses dispersed throughout three South African provinces by providing distance learning opportunities in computer literacy and Internet literacy and computer internships with major corporations for Vista students.
PGCC and its partners, Vista University in South Africa, Charles County Community College and Garrett Community College in Maryland, Africare, and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)/Adult Learning Service are matching $54,469 toward the International Workforce Development Partnership grant of $49,999.
PGCC and its Maryland educational partners will provide distance education training workshops for Vista University faculty and staff slated to begin in January in South Africa. Future training will take place in South Africa and in Maryland.
In addition to the activities of the colleges, PBS will provide technical expertise and support for a Web-based Literacy course. Africare, a private, voluntary organization with offices in 27 African nations, will place and supervise selected Vista Information Technology students in internships with Microsoft and TRW in South Africa. ITP and McGraw Hill will contribute textbooks for Vista personnel receiving distance learning training for Computer Literacy and Internet Literacy and Intel is providing a computer conferencing system.•
Capturing the results of higher education partnerships poses many challenges, many of which were addressed recently at the sixth ALO Policy Roundtable: Assessing Results of Higher Education Development Cooperation.
Dr. Joan M. Claffey, ALO Director, said, “We wanted to devise an instrument that could capture not only program approaches, goals and objectives important to USAID, but those of value to the higher education stakeholders in the partnerships.”
During the day-long discussion, participants were invited to consider case study examples submitted in advance and presented on-site by representatives from the Maricopa Advanced Technology Education Center (MATEC), Washington State University, and Tulane University. Representatives from G/HCD shared an overview of their program approaches and evaluation framework. All served as bases upon which to critique a draft monitoring and evaluation instrument in preparation by ALO for use in the Institutional Partnerships and Workforce Development Partnerships Programs.
The chief outcome of the Roundtable was a set of recommendations to guide the revision of the draft instrument, which employs a multi-tier process to address several outcomes: 1) how well each partnership addresses USAID’s long-term goals, 2) how well each partnership builds the capacities sought by the partnering institutions, 3) how well each partnership achieves specific development objectives, and 4) how well and how cost-effectively the collection of projects addresses the long-term goal of building sustainable capacity in host- country institutions to contribute to national and global development.
This evaluation plan focuses not only on specific quantifiable development outcomes, but also on other measurements of skills, knowledge, and perspectives acquired by the individuals involved with the project (human capacity building), and with policy and program effects of interest to the partner institutions.
ALO intends to disseminate the outcomes and lessons learned through this process to USAID and throughout the higher education community.
ALO distributed the draft monitoring and evaluation instrument to all ALO partners and AACC for comment. The complete report will be published in February.•
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Looking Back on a Legacy of Cooperation |
International cooperation between U.S. and Brazilian universities has left an indelible impression on development in that country, as well as on G. Edward Schuh of the University of Minnesota, and Chair of the Board for Food and Agricultural Development.
Schuh began his work in Brazil in 1963 as a member of the USAID-sponsored Purdue Project at the Federal University of Vicosa. USAID completed funding for this program in 1973. Schuh later worked with the Ford Foundation in Brazil with these universities, and made many visits over the years to work with students.
Visits last year to one of these Brazilian schools showed the long-term impact of the programs.
In 1964, one particular school’s department of agriculture had two faculty with M.S.-level training in agricultural economics and two with training in rural sociology. Today, the department has over 20 faculty trained at the Ph.D. level, most in the U.S. and some in Europe. The Department also now offers its own Ph.D. program – one that is close to attaining international standards.
The main purpose of Schuh’s recent trip to Brazil was to work with EMBRAPA, the national agricultural research organization. The organization was created largely by Schuh’s former students, and staffed largely by students trained in the programs the Agency helped to establish, or in the U.S. with participant training funds.
Schuh notes that it is difficult to quantify the contributions of institutions to development, but it is easy to see the program’s enormous effect in building human capital for agricultural development in Brazil as a result of these programs has been enormous.
“I believe it’s fair to say that the experience in Brazil also had an enormous effect in developing my own human capital,” said Schuh.•
When representatives from Kent and Tashkent State Universities came to Washington, D.C. to visit the Uzbekistan embassy, they got some unexpected help from the Uzbek Ambassador.
According to Kent State’s Dr. Mitch Fadem, project director, as a result of their meeting January 21, Ambassador Sodyq Safaev is arranging meetings for the partners with government departments working in environmental protection in Uzbekistan. They eventually plan to implement new standards and practices in environmental policy in Uzbekistan at the highest levels, and these meetings would be an important first step.
Kent and Tashkent State Universities are collaborating through an ALO/AACC Workforce Development partnership to establish an Associates of Applied Science degree in Environmental Technology at Tashkent. Six trainers from Uzbekistan are at Kent State January 25 through February 6 for a hazardous waste operations and emergency response “train the trainer” course. They, in turn, will train a group of 25 students, industry researchers, and chemistry industry officials in Uzbekistan.
Dr. Alex Khaydarov of Tashkent State describes curbing dangerous agricultural practices as one of the greatest challenges his country is facing . Farmers use a pesticide that is not unlike Agent Orange as a defolliant for cotton harvesting. Most young people are exposed to the substance while working in the fields for a month to three months yearly, resulting in a range of health problems, from runny noses to serious heart, stomach, liver, and kidney difficulties.
Khaydarov estimates it will take 30 years for Uzbekistan to completely recover from the pesticide damage. The partnership will not only help with the recovery but prevent future contamination through education and resultant policy changes.•
Through a higher education network across six Asian countries, the University of Washington (UW) is applying Internet technology to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum’s Southeast Asia Coastal Zones project to aid in regional water resource management.
With a competitive award from the Association Liaison Office for University Cooperation in Development (ALO) through a cooperative agreement with USAID, the network is bringing together the talents and resources of UW’s APEC Internet Collaboration Center (ICC), APEC, and the Global Change SysTem for Analysis Research and Training Program (START) regional center at Chulalongkorn
University’s Institute for Environmental Research in Bangkok, Thailand. The network involves institutions in the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Users from these countries interact with each other on a regular basis through the ICC on the activities of the Coastal Zones project.
In a letter of support for the APEC forum, Vice President Al Gore called the application of Internet technology an “important project” and noted that it could be a powerful tool in expanding collaboration in areas such as the environment, trade, and investment. In Osaka in 1995, the U.S. government and other APEC nations officially endorsed UW’s proposal for an APEC Internet network.
The primary goal of the ALO/USAID Institutional Partnership is to apply Internet technology to the Southeast Asia Coastal Zones project to build an integrated regional model of the river basins of Southeast Asia to facilitate regional decision-making on water resource management. The partnership provides a platform for the training of regional professionals, and contributes to the development of a communications network to facilitate and enhance research throughout the region.
An APEC Oceans Conference in Honolulu, Hawaii in October, 1998 was planned and executed through the APEC Internet Collaboration Center. The conference, focusing on the Southeast Asia Drainage Basin posed the question: “What are the physical and ultimately economic consequences of changing land-use and climate on the mobilization of water and its chemical load from the land surface into the coastal zone?”
Other planned activities include constructing the virtual ICC workspace and training principal research personnel in the lead countries; managing a series of virtual meetings among research scientists, policy makers, and other stakeholders; holding workshops in Bangkok to bring together research directors from Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia; attending APEC Marine Resource Conservation Working Group meetings; and deploying new collaborative technologies.
The grant from ALO of $99,817 generated over a 300% match in funds from UW, Chulalongkorn University, and other sources toward the total estimated cost of $411,443. Watch for new developments on this story and others on the ALO Web site, http://www.aascu.org/alo.•
Established in 1992, ALO coordinates the efforts of the nation's six major higher education associations to build their partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and to help their member institutions plan and implement development programs with colleges and universities abroad. Copyright 1998 by the Association Liaison Office. All rights reserved. Use of this publication in full or partial form is encouraged, but requires the permission of the publisher. Send comments, requests for addition to list, questions, and ideas for stories to ALO.
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