What has been achieved
The programme already allowed us to organize multiple exchanges for staff and students between our respective universities. For staff, this is a great opportunity to exchange knowledge, explore further collaborations and think together of long-term perspectives. We are also using this small network as a platform to join together different initiatives when we see fit. We also received master’s students and PhD candidates for a semester exchange. Overall, we see that the main needs are about methods courses, especially qualitative research design, and support to write theses and papers. The programme caters to students from a wide range of master programmes and PhD topics (those may include students specializing in management, development studies, ecology and sustainability, etc.). However, the main questions we have are about questioning terms, power relations, assumptions, and knowledge production when it comes to the issues at stake.
Our next steps
This Erasmus+ grant is a starting point. We want to make this collaboration meaningful not only for us but also for PhD candidates and students. It is thus about the team we are forming now, the bonds we will create by working together, and the long-term plans we will develop in innovating together when it comes to education first, but also to research and outreach. But it is also about our institutions. What we want to focus on is capacity-building and not only short-term but also long-term collaborations between our institutions. Apart from advocating about the opportunities of the Erasmus+ programme, we also want to inform, alert and advocate about the difficulties. The programme has been challenging, as it may reinforce already existing inequalities between a country like the Netherlands and countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, when it comes to issues like visa and financing. Sometimes, just getting a visa may be complex as it requires to travel to provide documentation to the other side of the country. When the Netherlands is a country with already high living costs, it is difficult to support students with a variety of backgrounds. We need to integrate those perspectives in the Erasmus+ programme to avoid reproducing the errors of the past and envision a decolonial education achieving, following the moto of Radboud University, a fair world with equal opportunities for all.
