The MS FSCC project brings five leading Southeast Asian higher education institutions in agriculture and life sciences from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to build a joint master’s degree on the topic of Food Security and Climate Change. These HEIs have been working together within the Southeast Asian University Consortium for Graduate Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC) since 1989 and have a concrete experience of exchanges in Science and Academic programmes but never reached the level of building a joint degree. The MS FSCC was designed on the model of the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degrees in Europe. It aimed at responding to acute needs in the professional sector that developed recently, where each individual university may not have all the disciplinary resources to address such topics at the highest (postgraduate) level. This difficulty is generally increased when the professional targets of the learning objectives lead to multidisciplinary orientations of teaching and research. A consortium of universities sharing common learning objectives and organising the mobility of students according to their individual academic strengths was assumed to be in a better position than individual Universities to produce graduates relevant to the market needs. This is the case with Food Security and Climate Change to prepare graduates to work at implementing the commitments of the member countries at the last Paris Conference on Climate Change, while taking into consideration the challenges of food security linked with the recent implementation of the ASEAN integrated market. This corresponds to a new professional challenge in the area of agriculture in SE Asia. The UC has the necessary skills to address this challenge, but individually, none have all the skills needed to properly address the training needs in this domain. Building a joint degree and using mobility to get the best offer in the region may better address that new challenge rather than what they would do individually. Simultaneously with the development of the synopsis of joint MS FSCC programme was the challenge of offering a dual/double degree, an innovation that the UC had never done before. By building common rules to govern within the MS FSCC: exchange/mobility of students, mutual recognition of courses between pairs of Universities within the UC, organisation of summer schools to offer courses to accommodate all students, option to have one semester mobility in Europe to complement the local supply of courses, FSCC-wide quality assurance system recognised by each of the collaborating Universities, and joint evaluation of master thesis between academic teams, Departments, Faculties of the different co-graduating Universities, the UC has experimented agreements that lead to building other post graduate joint programmes, a major institutional innovation in the SE Asian academic world. Whereas building this joint degree was much inspired by the European experience of the Erasmus Mundus programme, it required several adaptations and innovative rules in the participating Universities’ academic systems. These adaptations took more time than initially expected as it had to be accepted in five Universities in parallel and in real practice, for real students, in a real joint programme, and not just in theory. These innovations have been clearly identified, and at least they have been addressed in the case of a first collaborative programme, run with three successive cohorts of students.

ReVET is a Project involving 13 HEIs (3 European and 10 Asian) with the main aim to contribute to the promotion, strengthening and capacity building of veterinary studies in Asian partners Universities using the European “know-how”. The main basis of the present proposal is transferring and sharing the experience in the veterinary field from Europe to Asia and from Asia to Europe. The entire partnership will work together building and reinforcing curriculum and all the teaching material needed for a high quality standard veterinary college to be implemented in Asian partner countries. The proposal strategy is as follows; firstly, an infield study of the situation will give to the project a faithful idea of the state of the art. Secondly, this information will be reflected in a Situation Report (1 per Country) and shared on the ReVET platform. New veterinary curricula will be designed by EU and Asian academic staff; Asian teachers will receive a training of trainers in Europe (at the same time they will share their experience throughout open-day talks and lectures in the European HEIs). Third, all teaching materials needed, will be generated by European REVET Partners HEIs. Last, but not least, the new/up-dated curriculum will be implemented in the last year of the project. The impact of the project will be as a cascade: the teaching-learning process of the veterinary student is reinforced, thus skills will be improved, as the results of the improvement, the livestock production and welfare will be most favourable alleviating hunger and ensuring a better control of food safety. Finally zoonotic outbreaks will be reduced contributing to an overall beneficiary impact for the world.

Seafood is nutritious, delicious and probably the healthiest among the food items. Its demand is rapidly increasing in each country and globally as more people are becoming aware of the health and thus are shifting their food habits from red meat to white meat and then to seafood. Therefore, seafood sector has been increasingly important for food security, nutrition, income and employment. Annually 96 million tons of seafood is caught from the oceans and the natural water bodies while 82 million ton is produced from aquaculture (FAO data). Fish catch from the wild is declining due to overfishing. Aquaculture is rapidly expanding with the technological advancement often creating environmental problems causing frequent collapses of some aquaculture systems e.g. shrimp farming. Therefore, seafood insecurity has been a global issue urging the need to ensure long-term sustainability.Recognizing the key role of higher education in shaping the industry, a project entitled, “Curriculum development project for Sustainable Seafood and Nutrition Security (SSNS)” co-funded by EU Erasmus+ programme, was launched in Oct 2017. The main objectives of the programme were to identify the problems and missing gaps in the existing fisheries curricula in higher education institutions in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, and improve the curricula by developing specialized courses in changing context. Other objectives were to establish specialized SSNS centres and offer vocational training courses and internship programs so that the industry could get new dimension and better understanding. The project engaged over 60 lecturers from Asia and over 15 from Europe. A total of 57 MSc courses (target was 20, nearly 3 times more) have been either newly developed or improved from existing ones. Amongst them, more than 75% have already been accredited, incorporated into the curricula and offered to over 200 students (target 90).Typical new courses include Seafood and Human Nutrition, Seafood and Sustainable Development Goals, Seafood safety, Fish Quality and Traceability, Smart and Environmentally Friendly Aquaculture, Innovations in Fish Product Development among others. All the nine Asian partners established a new SSNS centre each or revived or strengthened the one which had earlier. Six of them have established new ones each and three of them strengthen their existing centres to contribute to the project objectives. More than 63 vocational training courses have also been developed, and nearly half of them were already offered during the project period to update the knowledge and also provide specific skills to over 600 professionals. The project also developed 48 Internship programs (target 45) to offer higher education degree students so that they could get exposure to the industry and get hands-on work experience. However, due to COVID-19, it was not possible to offer, although two partners managed to offer somehow, even though the project was extended for 12 months ended by Oct 14, 2021. The project organized two study trips to Europe; Norway and UK during which about 50 lecturers visited the renowned universities of Europe and learn how the courses are delivered. They also visited salmon farms and processing plants. They have learned how the courses are delivered and are encouraged to do more. Due to COVID19, program for Indonesia was organized online. A final conference was organized to review the outcomes and disseminate the outcomes of the project. Overall, the project team considers it very successful.