APPEAR in Practice
Do you know what the abbreviation APPEAR stands for?
Some of you might have heard this word. However, most of you may not know what this abbreviation stands for. APPEAR is an abbreviation for ‘Austrian Partnership Program in Higher Education and Research for Development’. It is one of the Austrian Development Cooperation Programs for scientific cooperation in Austrian partner countries and priority regions. As a scientific cooperation, it focuses on teaching learning and research for development activities targeting higher education institutions in developing countries. Accordingly, it announces open calls for projects each year which is too competitive to be selected for funding. APPEAR has its different phases for project partnership. These are preparatory funding project, academic partnership project, advanced academic partnership project, Impact extended partnership and Master and PhD Scholarships. For your more information about APPEAR, please use this link. https://appear.at/en/.
APPEAR invites project partners to share their experience in the project implementation, i.e., success issues and challenges in the implementation of the project. Debre Markos University Institute of Land Administration as a consequence of its strong networking and having grant projects from this funding organization, has been invited two times to share its experiences. The first was in 2017 while executing the EduLAND project whereas the second is in this month, May 2023 at the time of the project kick off meeting in Vienna.
The event was organized by APPEAR office and it was conducted on 09 May 2023 in APPEAR meeting hall in the availability of the invited audiences, about 80 people. The presenters were Dr Sayeh Kassaw with Dr Thomas Bauer and Dr Reinfried Mansberger. In the first instance, Sayeh and Thomas have presented reports on the achievements of EduLAND project and next Sayeh and Reinfried presented slides on the title of ‘Equal Partnership’. In both of these two presentations, a brief overview of the success factors and challenges as well as how the partnership gave focus on equal partnership was explicitly described. In the project, we have got experience that it is not only one flow of information rather northern partners gain knowledge and experience from southern partners and vice versa. In addition, the Edu4GEO project, the new project, work packages, main activities and guiding principles were presented. After presentations, questions were raised by the audience and hot discussions made on the issues. You can browse this link for more information: https://appear.at/en/news/article/2023/05/advancing-geomatics-education-appear-project-empowers-ethiopian-students-for-leadership-roles
In this APPEAR in practice workshop, Dr Tafere Melaku, President of Debre Markos University, was invited to present a 10 minutes speech about the partnership. He presented important ideas stating with the historical background of partnership of the two sister countries and the role of the APPEAR project in DMU history. He espoused that EduLAND project was the first grant project in the history of Debre Markos University and it has special impetus in the university partnership program.
