Kickoff Meeting and signing of Grant Agreements
Debre Markos University in collaboration with its partner universities has won two grant projects since 2023. These are ‘Implementation of Academic Geomatics Education in Ethiopia for Supporting Sustainable Development, Edu4Geo’ and ‘Land Information for Land Management, Li4LaM’ projects. According to the project implementation strategy plan, the kicks off meeting, grant agreement signature and workshop as well as excursion were carried out in Vienna, Austria from May 08 – 13/2023. The kick off meeting of the projects was started with opening speech and remarks by Prof. Doris DAMYANOVIC (Vice Rector for Teaching, Continuing Education and Students at BOKU); Prof. Wolfgang WAGNER (Dean for the Faculty of Mathematics and Geo-information of TUW); Norbert PFEIFER (Head of TUW Senate). From Ethiopian partner institutions, 23 project team members and 2 advisory team members in total 25 professionals have participated.
Edu4Geo is advanced academic partnership program of the previous academic project known as ‘Implementation of Academic Land Administration Education in Ethiopia for Supporting Sustainable Development, EduLAND’ and the partners are the previous 4 universities (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, BOKU; Debre Markos University, DMU; Technical University of Vienna (TUW); and Bahir Dar University, BDU. The main focus of the Edu4Geo project is upgrading the competence of undergraduate students through implementing a master curriculum on Geomatics. It is a three years project which has been started on 1 March 2023, and the kick off meeting and the signing of the grant agreement was conducted in Vienna, Austria on May 09, 2023. The grant agreement signature was carried out by the project coordinators of the partner universities (Dr Thomas from BOKU; Dr Sayeh from DMU; Dr Gerhard from TUW; and Dr Belachew from BDU). Presentation and discussions of aims, work strategy, work packages, working plan, responsibilities, and deliveries as well as administrative and financial issues were made in the kick off meeting. In this kick off meeting, presentations and discussions were also made on development and running of the master curriculum, provision of teaching and learning materials, capacity building as well as on the other work packages and activities.
The Li4LaM project is a capacity building project of the ERASMUS+ program of the EU. It is planned to be executed as a consortium effort of eight universities; four from Europe (BOKU, TUW, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; University of Agriculture, Krakow) and four from Ethiopia (DMU; BDU; WU and AAU). The main focus of this project is modernizing the curricula and building the capacity of academic staff of the partner universities by focusing on the state of the art technologies. It is also a three years grant project which has been started since January 01/2023. On May 10, 2023; the project description and kick off meeting for Li4LaM project was carried out. In this kick off meeting too, the work packages and planned activities were presented and thoroughly discussed.
