In light of the recent COP-26 conference in Glasgow, SUEUAA co-I, Professor Kamal Ketuly from the University of Duhok stresses the importance of public awareness of the green house gas, Sulphur Hexaflouride. Increasing public awareness is of course an important aspect of regional and city engagement of academics. Here are his thoughts:. 

We are very pleased to announce that our partner in SUEUAA, the University of Duhok was this year ranked fourth amongst all Iraqi Universities and first amongst those universities in Iraq's Kurdistan Region. This is a great achievement for the university and its President Prof. Mosleh, and all in SUEUAA offer our congratulations, given in particular the difficulties in funding in the country.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Glasgow's bid for funding for the period, 2020-2022, from the European Commission within the aegis of the Erasmus+ Institutional Credit Mobility (ICM) programme with our SUEUAA partners in Zimbabwe and Iraq has been successful.

I'm pleased to report that as a result of the enhanced relation that the University of Glasgow has built with the University of Zimbabwe in SUEUAA, the Department of Education at the university has agreed to join the network, Leading Teacher Education in Times of Crisis and Challenge, and will be represented by its Dean, Prof Oswell Hapanyengwi. This is an international, online network for those involved in leading teacher education to discuss current challenges arising from Covid-19; to share national / local responses to issues such the student practicum/placement and to consider

Professor Michael Osborne, Director of PASCAL in Europe was very pleased to be invited by Seoul National University for a week of activities in Seoul, beginning 14 October 2019.

On Friday 18 October, he was a keynote speaker at the 20th International Conference on Research in Education organised by the Department of Education, Education Research Institute, and Seoul National University with over 500 delegates. The conference was co-hosted by the Korean Ministry of Education, the Korean Educational Development Service (KEDI), the Korean Educational Research Association and the Korea Institute for Educational Evaluation.

The Fourth International Conference on Learning Cities, was jointly organized by the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UiL) and the Municipality of Medellín; during the 2-day Conference from 1-3 October 2019, there were around 650 conference participants, including 50 mayors, as well as government representatives and experts in the field of education.

In a series of SUEUAA working papers, the team focus on overarching themes (environment, policy, migration, gender, and the economy), and show the similarities and differences across the different study cities in terms of the capacity of the University to respond to these city-wide issues. 

The fifth in this series provides both a general overview of the socio-economic context of each of the partner countries and cities and  explores the role that universities can play and what they can contribute in supporting and enhancing socio-economic development in the pursuit of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

One of its recent seminars of the Jean Monnet Network, ‘The EU’s Role in the Implementation of the SDGs in Asia Pacific’, was delivered by Dr Lavinia Hirsu, SUEUAA co-I, on the topic of Gender Equality. The related Policy Brief produced by Lavinia, and two colleagues who were also part of our GCRF project, SUEUAA,  Lamiah Hashemi, University of Kurdistan and Zenaida Quezada-Reyes, Philippines Normal University is attached.

The UKFIET: Education and Development Forum recently organised a conference (September 17-19, 2019) in Oxford, UK, around the theme of Inclusive Education Systems: Future, Fallacies and Finance. The conference included a series of presentations organised around six major sub-themes: future directions in inclusive education systems, problematizing inclusive systems, education financing for global equity and inclusion, education technology and data science for inclusive systems, education system actors, strengthening inclusive practice and system responses to conflict and crises.