The launch ceremony was attended, among others, by HEC chairman Tariq Banury, British High Commissioner to Pakistan Thomas Drew, British Council country director Rosemary Hilhorst.

A delegation of representatives of UK universities also attended the meeting, The News reports.

The framework will focus on six main areas: collaborative research, higher education leadership, quality assurance, distance learning, international mobility, TNE, and community engagement.

It will support the goals set out by the Higher Education Commission strategy to 2025 for the higher education sector in the country, including a 15% growth in enrolments and an increase of 40% in faculty members with a PhD.

Each area of the framework lists a number of initiatives that will be undertaken to strengthen the collaboration between the higher education sectors in the two countries.

These include improving two-way mobility for students and faculty, strengthening existing scholarship and fee-waiver programs, establishing a quality assurance framework for Pakistani HE and developing a collaboration framework on TNE between the two countries.

The recently launched Education Gateway builds on a long collaboration between the British Council and the Higher Education Commission, which has been operating for 15 years and facilitated a variety of programs, from leadership development to student and teacher training. Partnerships between 160 institutions in Pakistan and 65 in the UK have also been facilitated by the collaboration.

In 2018, the BC and HEC organised six roundtables in the UK which were attended by a delegation from Pakistan and representatives of 40 UK institutions.

British Airways will resume flights to Pakistan in 2019 after it stopped flying to the country following the Marriott Hotel bombing in 2008, the BBC reports.

An earlier version of this article mistakenly dated the Islamabad attacks 2018. It was in 2008.