In the last two decades, an information revolution in the global south has profoundly shaped the urbanisation of metropolitan regions. Global and national initiatives to adopt smart technologies in local governments, with the claim that opportunities presented by digitalisation will resolve the challenges of urbanisation – are now literally automating regional futures. This project will conduct the first comprehensive South-South investigation of the dynamics of digitalisation-as-urbanisation – the transition to automated planning processes in metropolitan regions, and its impacts on regional urbanisation. The project will conduct research in peri-urban municipalities of three rapidly growing metropolitan regions of the global south where municipal digitalisation is directed towards strategic regional planning. These municipalities face major challenges with transforming paper-based colonial and postcolonial bureaucracies into automated planning processes within highly unequal contexts, and therefore represent the wider experience of digitalisation-as-urbanisation in the global south. Through detailed ethnography, interviews and information audit trails in digitalising municipalities, the project will investigate a) the rescaling of governance to the local digitalising state; b) the territorialisation of information infrastructures; and c) territorial politics of digitalisation. It will examine how digitalisation produces new territories for regional urbanisation and how state and non-state actors are assisting, contesting and disrupting these regional futures. It will bring to fruition the applicant’s agenda setting work on postcolonial urban futures, smart cities, digital citizenships and recent work on the governance of small cities in the global south. The project will build new theories and detailed empirical evidence of southern urbanisation as both a product and a producer of the ‘information revolution’ in the global south.

"With the capacity building project ""DigiUGov"", the project partners aim to make a significant contribution to an inclusive digital transformation at universities in Colombia, Mexico and Europe. By supporting (early stage) researchers, digital teaching and research will be strengthened locally, internationally connected and finally consolidated through the establishment of corresponding structures and governance mechanisms at the participating institutions. With the same objective, the digitalizationof the university administration will be promoted through international exchange and adequate consultation formats. Science managers and representatives of the various status groups at the participating universities are being recognised as key players and their competences are being strengthened. The systematic engagement of civil society actors and relevant companies in the exchange formats and in the implementation projects ensures that the project goals set are accurately and that they can be adapted to the needs of the situation during the project. The capacity-building goal of the project is to enable the establishment of sustainable structures at the partner institutions by involving and activating these groups and through pilot projects."

YachaY is the Quechua word for “knowledge” and represents the project entitled “Intelligent personalization and flexibility systems to improve the quality of Virtual Higher Education in Latin America”.The main objective of YachaY is to create and test a series of intelligent technological solutions for Latin America and the Caribbean, which facilitate the implementation of the educational requirements of the 21st Century of flexibility, customization, credentialing, and inclusion; in synergy with the business framework.The fourth industrial revolution requires changes in the education system that involve empowering students in the definition of their learning paths and acquisition of skills, improve the systems of recognition of qualifications and modernize higher education institutions, through the use of intelligent systems for interaction with students. For this, it is necessary to strengthen the university-business relationship, so we intend to create and implement a series of unified tools for Latin America, in line with those in Europe, for customization, flexibility, credentialing and organizational interaction.YachaY responds to the preferences and needs of today's students. Especially to those who choose virtual training, precisely because they are, in most cases, busy people, integrated into the workplace, seeking to improve their skills through lifelong learning, in a way that is really practical for the development of their professional careers, being able to guide their own learning path.Personalization, flexibility, credentialing; they are key words in 21st century education. An education more inclusive and adapted to the real needs of our increasingly competitive and demanding world.

Science has undergone, since the end of the XX century, a biotechnological development hardly imagined some years ago. Genetics, medicine and new technologies have transformed human reality as we knew it up to now, raising serious ethical doubts. Is everything technically possible also acceptable in ethical terms? And if so, where are the legal limits? In Biolaw it converge science to reach an advanced knowledge, ethics to question the limits and the complexity of realities and law to offer a fair response. However, the professional world and the academia lack the skills, the training opportunities and the necessary resources to cope with these problems. With this project, we hope to create a mass of well trained lecturers and professionals in the field of Biolaw at each partner institution in Costa Rica and Mexico. On the basis of the existing offer and demand, we will develop 4 capacity and 2 doctoral courses online, focused on research skills and on Bio-law specific topics. We will support the launch of a new joint doctoral programme in Mexico and will support its expansion with 1 more university in Mexico and 2 new in Costa Rica. The courses will be developed and taught online and in 3 different languages (English, French and Spanish). The new academic offer, together with a set of training and dissemination activities –international seminars, conferences and stays abroad- and the help of new elearning and bibliographical equipment, will come to integrate the partner’s doctoral and lifelong learning offer, contributing this way to the emergence of a critical mass of well trained lecturers and professionals and to its further development, also at international level.The project will surely impact not only in partner institutions, improving their accessibility, visibility and their capacity of attraction and influence, but also in the public and private sectors of Health, Environment a Law in the partner regions and countries.

The ENTENDER project is a joint project in Region 8 (Latin America). It addresses the regional priority for ‘Improving management and operations of higher education institutions’ and specifically aligns with the CBHE priority ‘Equity, access to and democratisation of higher education.’ As suggested by the CBHE definition, the project will promote the inclusion of people with neurodiversity, who, as a sector of a larger group of people with disabilities, are currently disadvantaged by society resulting in them being disproportionately represented amongst the world’s lower socioeconomic groups. The aim of the project is to improve access, retention, attainment and employment prospects of people with neurodiverse conditions in Argentina and Mexico, allowing them to achieve their full potential by capacity building of neurodiversity support across higher education and employment sectors, fostering inclusion, and building knowledge. National education systems, which promote human capital development, play a major role in fostering economic development and strengthening the social institutions in a country and it is through education that disadvantage can be addressed. All project activities have been planned in an “inclusive” way to allow the participation of a wide range of internal and external stakeholders including students, parents, teachers, senior managers, employers and social partners. The EU will build capacity in Argentina and Mexico to deliver national and regional priorities by providing support for EU university staff to share knowledge and good practice, resources for teaching training and curriculum change, peer support programmes and employability support.