As part of the dialogue sessions, the ASEAN Working Group on Higher Education Mobility 2025 was also officially launched. It is expected to support efforts on strengthening ASEAN’s higher education system, through developing strategies to realise the region’s Higher Education Space, for greater people-to-people connectivity and knowledge transfer across ASEAN while receiving technical and operational support from SHARE.

“SHARE continues its commitment to extend the benefits of the project to a wider range of institutions and students across ASEAN,” said Darren McDermott, SHARE team leader.

“SHARE continues its commitment to extend the benefits of the project”

“We will do this by providing technical assistance to the ASEAN secretariat and regional stakeholders to enhance regional capacity in higher education as laid out in the ASEAN work plan on education 2021-2025.”

With the policy dialogues designed in partnership with the ASEAN secretariat’s Education, Youth and Sports Division, it continued ongoing discussions on how to transfer SHARE’s program outcomes to ASEAN entities, as well as partnerships and internationalisation in the region more broadly.

Earlier this year it was announced that the SHARE program would be extended until 2022, with the new phase funded by €5 million from the EU and €175,000 from the British Council.

In a statement, the ASEAN secretariat said that “developing adaptable, resilient and future-ready human resources is vital to support the recovery and development of the ASEAN region in the post-pandemic world”.

“Taking this into consideration, the ASEAN higher education sector aims to support this effort through the realisation of an ASEAN higher education space, characterised by increasing levels of internationalisation, harmonisation, innovation and partnerships.”