Brazil has initiated a program to foster higher education in five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa: Angola, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Principe. Devised on May 21 of this year at a meeting on “Education as a Strategic Bridge for the Brazil-Africa Relationship”, the program will dispatch educators and researchers from twenty of Brazil’s institutions of higher education to the selected African countries. According to Clélio Campolina, a rector from Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais, the country has never before launched a project of such a scale and kind. Read more...

The United States and India and share strong linkages and a history of collaboration in the field of higher education. The United States is the most favored destination for Indian students, with more than 100,000 Indian students pursuing higher studies in the United States. In response to strong interest among academic communities in both countries, we convened a highly successful U.S.-India Higher Education Summit in Washington D.C. in October 2011 that ultimately led to the establishment of an annual bilateral Higher Education Dialogue.
U.S.-India Higher Education Dialogue
The annual Higher Education Dialogue was originally held in June 2012 in Washington, D.C. and is being held in New Delhi on June 25, 2013. Key areas of collaboration include student and faculty exchange, research cooperation, implementing technology-enabled education strategies such as e-learning and online courseware, cooperation between community colleges, and facilitating partnerships between Indian and American universities. Read more...

By Satiman Jamin. The issue of sponsorship of students to overseas universities dominated the state assembly session today as the opposition questioned the choice of universities that Terengganu students were sent to.
The state government had chosen to send students under its sponsorship to Jordan instead of Egypt due to the latter's unstable political situation, said Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Ahmad Said.
He said the decision was made after evaluating that the education system in Jordan was better than in Egytian universities.
"Based on our experience and evaluation, we found that the education system in Jordan is better, apart from the security factor," he said.
"We accept that the Al-Azhar University (in Egypt) is a great institution and the oldest but it will all depends on the students," he said in his answer to a supplementary question from Satiful Bahri Mamat (Pas-Paka). Read more...

By Adam Taylor. This morning, the New York Post published a story arguing that New York University was "booting" blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng from the university after pressure from the Chinese government. The paper speculates that NYU's plans for a Shanghai campus were behind the decision. Chen, a political dissident who spent years under house arrest in China, became a fellow at the university after escaping from his homeland with the help of Hillary Clinton in May 2012.
Now a source close to Chen has hit back at the article, describing it as a "hatchet job" on embattled NYU President John Sexton, whom the source also described as a "hero" and a "stand up guy" for the role he played in accepting Chen in the first place. Read more...

On 4–5 June 2013, the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), in collaboration with the Korean National Institute for Lifelong Education (NILE) and the Jeju Institute for Lifelong Education, held the 2nd Meeting of the Expert Group for Establishing the International Platform for Learning Cities (IPLC) in Jeju Island, Republic of Korea. Thirty experts representing partners for establishing the IPLC participated in the meeting.
The participants elaborated on the draft Key Features of Learning Cities, developed by UIL in consultation with its partners. While endorsing the features in general, some experts suggested including more relevant social inclusion and sustainable development features and measurements. Experts supported the strategy for piloting the key features in a number of cities in different regions of the world, and they offered help in selecting cities to conduct the piloting. Furthermore, the meeting discussed the draft Beijing Declaration on Building Learning Cities, in preparation for its adoption by an international conference on learning cities, co-organised by UNESCO, the Ministry of Education of China and Beijing Municipal Government, which will take place in Beijing, China from 21–23 October 2013. The experts also actively participated in the International High-Level Forum of Lifelong Learning Cities, a showcase of both international and Korean perspectives and best practices on promoting lifelong learning in cities. It is evident that more and more cities in different regions of the world are using the concept of ‘learning cities’ to tackle urban development challenges.