AAU has opened the 1^st DIES (Dialogue on Innovative Higher Education Strategies) project – workshop that has brought three universities together; Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) of Germany, Addis Ababa University (AAU) of Ethiopia and Gulu University (GU) of Uganda from November 11-14, 2019 at Goethe-Institute, Ethiopia.

 The workshop opened under the trilateral cooperation of these three universities is focused on “University Partnership for Excellence and Innovation in Education, Research, Knowledge and Technology Transfer” which is under DIES project.  

The cooperation project has three main sub projects; knowledge and Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurial Culture, Building up a Graduate Program Hub and Benchmarking and Quality Management.

The workshop concerns to undertake detail discussions on each sub projects between the three universities for clarification, input collection, information gathering and working on concrete measures to consolidate the project and goal oriented.

On his opening remark, Prof. Tassew Woldehanna, President of AAU said that, Addis Ababa University has been playing a great role in educating the younger generation of Ethiopia for nearly seven decades.

Tassew also said, “AAU has been providing economic support to the country and offers overall encouragement to the ever growing universities in Ethiopia. “AAU is a graduate and research university and is a member of the African research university alerts. Currently it is ranked 10^th among the global best universities in Africa.”

“AAU has been cooperating with universities in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America, North America and others. The current cooperation with MLU, GU and AAU can be very useful to achieving improvements in providing quality education, quality research output and quality service.” He added

“This project will also promote the image and reputation of the university nationally and internationally and facilitates knowledge management and research output dissemination attempting incubation and technology transfer.”

Furthermore, said the president “This partnership project will contribute a lot to improve the university’s rank both regionally and globally.”

On the workshop the heads and staff members of each partner university who involved in the so-called “sub projects’’ have presented proposals and research findings.

MLU and AAU have had long lasting cooperation for more than 15 years in the fields of Law, Economic Sciences- Medicine, pharmacy and information system which have helped in educating young scholars to the PhD and doing research.

This DIES partnership project is funded by DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)

Tsion Aysheshim November 13, 2019

Photograph by Fikremariam Beyene