The UfM Secretary General meets the UNESCO delegation to prepare the 3rd World Conference on Higher Education

7 October 2020, Barcelona. UfM Secretary General, Nasser Kamel, met with Peter Wells, Chief of the Section for Higher Education of UNESCO, and Josep M. Vilalta, Director of the Global University Network for Innovation (GUNi) and Executive Secretary of the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP).

The meeting was the occasion to strengthen the cooperation between UNESCO and the UfM in the field of higher education, opening pathways for future collaboration. The Secretary General emphasized that the UfM is a unique regional organization that gathers 42 Member States from the two shores of the Mediterranean that can give real and effective support to the work of UNESCO. During the meeting, the necessity of fostering the recognition of qualifications concerning higher education in the Mediterranean was stressed, in line with the Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications that was adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 2019. Academic mobility and the internationalization of higher education in the region were also identified as topics on which both organizations can collaborate.

The Secretary General expressed full support to the organization of the 3rd UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education, to be held in Barcelona in October 2021, and assured that the UfM Secretariat will closely collaborate with ACUP and GUNi, which are the local organizers of this major event that takes place once each 10 years. Itaf Ben Abdallah, UfM Senior Advisor for Higher Education and Research, announced that a side-event of the Conference with a Mediterranean focus was also foreseen, linking with UfM ongoing efforts in the fields of higher education and research, including skills, academic mobility and employability.