Formation of Teachers for Emerging Challenged Areas in the Philippines (FORTH) addresses the reality of teaching in socio-economic deprived areas with very specific needs and contexts for both children and teachers. FORTH particularly addresses teacher´s loss of motivation and self-esteem ending in absenteeism and attrition. It addresses this challenge with a number of joint measures such as bringing to the forefront the relevance of this mission for the eradication of poverty through education, highlighting the importance of this task creating new curricula and developing it into a Master and then into an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree while making it accessible to a) people already in the area (part time) and b) those who make it a choice and a vocation to go to these areas. The curricula will be designed jointly by specialists from Phil and EU, having a critical mass 10 per university fully trained (total 50 people) and making it a centre of excellence by research and international links.Other measures relate to a plan for BA students, willing to take their practical year in these marginal areas, learning and taking part in the project. Further, the project will foster the creation of University clusters, learning communities of university- school teachers (in the selected areas as a pilot) enjoy join learning activities related to exploit specific methodologies existing for these type of teaching and use and build new material relevant to the children´s in these areas to learn and create self-esteem, sense of value and conviction that they can make it. Web repositories and audiovisual material will be created jointly the Master students and the teachers in the area.FORTH intends to be a pilot in the Philippines to be replicated in other parts of the world, making a network of interested partners. FORTH counts on a privilege team both in Phil and in EU and particularly it counts on the presence and support of the Ministry of Education of the Philippines.

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.