Asian Family Businesses (FB) are the backbone of the Asian economy, however the specific characteristics of family businesses which can affect their longevity and their competitiveness remain unexplored. More efforts should be directed towards studying the contribution of family businesses to establish the proper institutional frameworks to support their longevity. In this context the project aims to create a new Master’s programme in the specialized academic area of FB Management in total 16 HEIs of Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, that is as much absent from HEI programmes in the Partner Countries (PC) involved as it is needed. The FAB curriculum will incorporate novel entrepreneurial theories, business models and innovative management tools fostering new family entrepreneurs, but also promoting entrepreneurial behaviour (including innovation) in existing family firms.Beyond coursework, the program will be structured around:- industry placement, in family businesses;- ‘FB Centers of Excellence’ in PC HEIs that will act as foci for research and innovation in the area;- country-specific VET online courses (MOOCs), introducing PC HEIs in the MOOC era;- digital learning, to allow modern forms of learning, as well as to enable contribution from experts across the globe in the development of the program;- promote cooperation, exchange of know-how and good practices in the subject area between EU and PC HEIs;-establish viable synergies and links with family businesses in order to address their needs in specialized personnel and enhance the employability of FAB graduates;-contribute to local economic growth, by providing to program participants the right knowledge/skills/tools to turn the local family-business sector into a driver of social and economic growth;-promote dialogue between the academic sector, family businesses and policy/decision makers in PC and help convey the concerns faced by FB into policy consultation processes.

EngInes aims at increasing the employability of Engineers in the region of South Asia, with a focus on India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. The key issue identified is the fact that a large percentage of engineering graduates in the region, find themselves to be unemployable in the labour market. Our project is developing a toolbox with numerous services and products to increase the employability of students, providing with skills and capacities in request in the labour market.Key outputs include the development and implementation of:1. Tracer Studies 2. Training Needs Analysis3. Occupational Profiles4. Work-Based-Learning programmes5. Mentoring programmes6. Guidance programmes7. Field trips8. Career offices restructuring plansThe project includes study visits and knowledge transfer visits among Partner and Porgramme Country HEIs together with an intense training and pilot-testing period. The project's goal is to link innovations and skills in demand in the private sector with academic curricula, allowing universities to update their courses and studying programmes easily and accurately with scientifically backed methodologies and tools.

Lighting is the major consumer of electricity in developing countries consuming up to 86% of total electricity production. In the un-electrified rural villages, traditional biomass and commercial petroleum fuel is used to provide minimal lighting in the homes. Nepal and Bhutan are perfect examples of such developing countries where on one hand large population have to rely on fuel based lighting and on the other hand major portion of electricity is consumed for lighting. Most of the current lighting design, lamps and lighting technologies used in these areas are inefficient. Nepal and Bhutan has large potential of energy saving by applying energy efficient techniques in lighting. There is growing need of technical expertise and experience to convert that potential into reality.The aim of the project was to support Nepali and Bhutani Higher Education Institutions to provide education that promotes sustainable socio-economic development. The specific objectives of the project were: 1. To raise awareness in efficient lighting management and to identify important factors of needs and opportunities in efficient lighting in Nepal and Bhutan2. To develop energy efficient lighting courses and lighting laboratory3. To enhance and upgrade the skills of teaching staffs for improved academic environmentThe direct target groups of the project are 1) undergraduate, graduate and post graduate students at Universities in Nepal and Bhutan 2) Trainers, educators, and teachers in professional academies; 3) Academics in the advanced lighting field. Final beneficiaries of the project are professionals in the building industry chain, lighting industry equipment producers and lighting efficiency service providers, and government officials, energy regulators, NGOs. The project was able to improve the situation and enhance the opportunities of all target groups by providing them with detailed new higher education tools in the field of energy efficient lighting.

Nepal, Bhutan and India face serious development challenges, compounded by shortage of workforce trained with modern pedagogical methods. Solving such challenges requires transdisciplinary engagement with societal partners. Problem Based Learning (PBL) methodologies provide an effective way to educate students in systems thinking and deal with complexity. But most technical Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in South Asia do not offer such PBL based courses. Educators are not trained in using PBL methods, especially to deal with complex development goals. In contrast, EU HEIs such as Aalto and TU Delft focus on university-wide efforts for global inclusive development. Through this project, the EU HEIs aim to develop a leading practice for global PBL projects. This project addresses a strategic bottleneck: preparing graduates for challenging work, holistic problem analysis and interdisciplinary knowledge creation in real settings. The two layers of cooperation include 1) training of faculty and the development of PBL methodologies, and 2) joint piloting of PBL cases involving student teams. The project will establish PBL into the curricula of partner HEIs in Nepal and Bhutan. The EU HEIs each take a specific role in the project: TUDelft with entrepreneurship education and online education, KTU with data gathering and monitoring of project results, and Aalto in overall project management and emphasis on global sustainability issues. IISc Bangalore and IIT Bombay will develop a regional network of PBL specialists and disseminate best practices through teacher training and policy influencing activities in India. All HEIs will contribute to the student case pilots. Dissemination will be carried out through publications, seminars, and creation of a regional PBL network in South Asia. After the end of the project, PBL courses will continue in all the ten participating HEIs.

The Hindu-Kush Himalaya is a region that is commonly known as the 'third pole' given the volume of glacier ice that is stored in the mountains - more than anywhere on earth outside the Arctic and Antarctic. Crucially, many millions of people living in the foothills and further downstream rely on the meltwater from these glaciers for their daily drinking, sanitation and irrigation needs. The region as a whole is known to be extremely sensitive to climate change, and the speed at which warming is taking place is greatest at high-elevation - where the glacier ice is located. It is still largely unknown, however, how climate is likely to change across the region in the future, and the impact this will have on melting glacier ice and those that rely on it in their everyday lives. It is difficult to predict the impacts of future climate change in the region, because we know so little about the glaciers other than what we can measure at the surface. Many glacier models that are designed to predict glacier evolution therefore assume many of the parameters that are unknown, but these parameters are also very important to their functioning - for example the temperature of the ice, the thickness of the ice, and the existence or otherwise of sediment at the ice-bedrock interface. In this project we aim to collect real measurements of these subsurface properties and thus make much more robust predictions of how these glaciers may chance with climate. We will drill six boreholes at four locations into the Khumbu Glacier, Nepal, which descends from Mount Everest and is one of the largest in the Himalayan region. It is debris-covered for its lowermost eight kilometres but pocked with clean-ice exposures that we can exploit with a hot-water drill. We will gather visual footage of each borehole interior and install a multi-sensor array at the bed at each of the four locations. The arrays will log water pressure, temperature, electrical conductivity and turbidity and how each of these parameters changes through the seasons. At two additional boreholes we will install englacial temperature and tilt strings to determine the thermal and deformation profiles of the glacier. Existing glacier models are poorly tested to their sensitivity of variability in the input data. It is important to know how the model responds to small changes in the predicted climate for example, compared with small changes in basal water pressure or temperature. These sensitivity tests tell us about the uncertainty in our predictions as well as how the whole climate-glacier system works. We aim to test the sensitivity of the glacier model that we are using to a range of different parameters by adjusting them individually and analysing the change in prediction in each case. Ultimately, we will include our real-world data in the model and make robust predictions of debris-covered glacier evolution under a warming climate. This work will inform regional policy makers concerned with future water supply, local humanitarian aid agencies who will work with foothill dwellers in periods of flood and drought, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which will inform future climate summits on the world stage, and local people who are dependent on glacier runoff for irrigation, hydro-electric power production and sanitation.