The Twinning project 'Support to Strengthening the higher education system in Azerbaijan' held its 6th Project Steering Committee Meeting on 27 November.

The meeting was attended by Project Leaders from implementing partner organizations, a representative of the EU Delegation to Baku and by staff members of the Science, Higher and Secondary Professional Education Department and component leaders.

BC Project Leader Shahin Bayramov welcomed the MS Project Leaders to the Ministry of Education on behalf of his Department.  

He briefly described the activities carried within the project over the 6th quarter.

He particularly stressed the work done by the project to revise the state standards selected as pilots within the project. He also noted that the template of the revised study programmes developed by the Twinning experts will be used as a frame in order to revise about 140 study programmes which are planned to be introduced starting from 2020 academic year.

“We are getting closer to the end of the year and we should now think about the sustainability of the project results,” said Mr. Bruno Curvale, Senior Project Leader and Head of Higher Education Unit at the International Center for Pedagogical Studies (CIEP) of France.

“The sustainability is of upmost importance for us,” Mr. Curvale added.

In her turn, Resident Twinning Advisor of the project Ms. Lisa Bydanova presented the results of the 6th quarter of the project implementation as per component.

“A total of 13 expert missions and 63 working days have been implemented in the 6th quarter,” RTA said.

“The next project quarter will more focus on mock evaluation of the selected study programmes in pilot universities,” Ms. Bydanova added.

Later each of the component leaders from BC presented a brief of the activities carried out in their relevant components over the last quarter.

At the end the next Project Steering Committee Meeting was tentatively scheduled for the late February 2020.

As part of their visit for the Project Steering Committee Meeting, the MS Project Leaders also met with Mr. Yagub Piriyev, Acting Head of the Science, Higher and Secondary Professional Education Department of the Ministry of Education. During the meeting the project leaders presented the draft document which was developed by them and which contains a summary of the recommendations produced by the Twinning experts so far to the Higher Education Department and expressed their hope that the document would be useful. They also stressed that the document is open for further comments and discussions.