Annual Review Meeting 20-23 October 2014

For those of you who follow our cooperation, it might be of interest to know that the UR-Sweden Programme for Research, Higher Education and Institutional Advancement, of which we are part, organizes its Annual Review Meeting (ARM) in Kigali at the Nobleza hotel between Monday 20th and Thursday 23rd October. During that meeting, team leaders from both Rwanda and Sweden meet and evaluate the passed year in their own specific groups (sub programmes or areas) as well as with representatives of Sida (the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency)/the Swedish Embassy and the University of Rwanda management and coordinators.

 The cooperation between Swedish universities and the University of Rwanda is done within the framework of the Sida Research Training Partnership Programme and the programme period is five years. The present programme period started in July 2013 and runs until June 2018. Most of the cooperations under the Sida-UR umbrella, are academic ones but a few sub programmes are research support components, such as the library sub programme.

The overall aim of the Sida Research Training Partnership Programme is to

support the strengthening of institutional research capacity at universities and research institutions/organisations in Sweden's target countries, contributing to increased capacity for carrying out research for inclusive development. (directly taken from the Sida web page)

and for the University of Rwanda cooperation it has been specified as:

[to] increase production and use of scientific knowledge of international quality that contributes to Rwanda's development.

Many of the cooperating partners are in the process of either planning and giving masters programmes or doing the same for doctoral ones. Reserch and publishing is worked upon. Our sub programme has as its overall objective

[to] reinforce the work of creating a modern research library at the core of the university, providing relevant support and resources necessary for the research capacity development at the University of Rwanda.

For this, we have specified several sub objectives and a lot of activities by the help of a Results Based Management Logframe, that is evaluated every year. More about that in another post. Attending the meeting next week are:

• Marguerite Umubyeyi, Team Leader for the UR Library
• Daton Ngilinshuti, Deputy Team Leader for the UR Library
• Veronica Trépagny, Team Leader at the Swedish School of Library and Information Science, SSLIS
• Anna Stockman, Deputy Team Leader at the Blekinge Institute of Technology

 Veronica Trépagny, Team Leader at SSLIS