Project Summary
The project MS FSCC brings together the five leading Southeast Asian higher education institutions in agriculture and life sciences from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia to build a joint Master Degree on the topic of Food Security and Climate Change. All these founding HEIs have been working together within the University Consortium for Graduate Education in Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC) since 1989 and therefor have a concrete experience of exchanges in Science and Academic programmes, while, up to now, they never reached the level of building a joint degree.
The MS FSCC will be designed on the model of the Erasmus + Joint Master Degrees in Europe (former Erasmus mundus); it will include obligatory mobility of students between at least two of the graduating Universities, a joint selection, and the award of a joint degree at the end of the two years of studies. Access to the MSc will be open to the other universities of the region with the support of SEARCA, the Regional Center for Higher Education in Agriculture. The modalities of the linkage between the joint MS FSCC and the other higher education institutions will be experimented with the other HEIs which are full partners of this project, including in the neighboring Cambodia.
Cooperation exchanges will be established with European Joint Degrees on the same topic, especially with the European MSc “Agriculture, Climate change, Transitions” here represented by two of its leading graduating institutions Gottingen University, the third EU partner has been associated to the UC for more than 15 years.
The MSc responds to acute needs in the professional sector to prepare graduates able to work at implementing the commitments of the project member countries at the last Paris Conference on Climate Change, while taking into consideration the challenges of food security linked with the recent implementation of the ASEAN integrated market.