• Mobility window | research internship at partner university. During the first module, within the framework of the course “Research Methods II”, IOB students can apply for a research internship  to work on an ongoing research project at partner universities (in the Philippines, Tanzania, Uganda). In Tanzania the mobility window research is often linked to the citizen science research projects of Fuatilia Maji and Women Water Watch

• Dissertation mobility | During Module IV – the dissertation module - students can also apply to do field work for their dissertation with one of the partner universities or to other countries of the global South.  Travel grants are available for both the mobility window programme and the field work mobility.

Staff Mobility is organized in both directions (from IOB to partners and partners to IOB), and stimulated as part of ICP Connect. 

• contributions in educationMobility of academic staff leads to contributions in education (guest lecturers, co-teaching modules, involvement in benchmark or curriculum development, …) and/ or research and outreach activities at both IOB and the partner universities.

• Microcredentials: Partner staff are invited to enroll for micro credentials organised at IOB ( free for IOB partners) and receive a UAntwerp micro credential certificate.

• programme  partners have participated in the IOB dissertation benchmark exercise. Their insights on the quality of our dissertations as well as the grading process was useful to adapt possible cultural biases in our grading process as well as give feedback on the development relevance of our graduates’ dissertations. Partner staff has been involved in various other reflection and feedback meetings and exercises to improve IOB programmes.

• IOB staff has also been supporting the development of the new Master in Development Evaluation which will be organised at Mzumbe University. 

• A co-created course on community based monitoring (CBM) has been developed with partners from the Philippines and is taught at IOB as a subunit in Module III of the IOB  masters. An action lab linked to this topic/ course has been developed jointly with Mzumbe University through the action research project (Fuatilia Maji & Women Water Watch) in which students (both IOB and partner) learn about the practice of community based monitoring in the rural water sector.

• In 2024 the CBM course will be organised at the university of Mzumbe (Tz) and  broadened to all partners and consist of a

1. co-created (hybrid) theoretical part, 
   

2. a (practical) training guide section 

3. And linked to the action lab: a Tanzania/Uganda community-based action research project (=action lab) in which (selected) students & staff from the different partners can jointly participate. 

The aim is to link the CBM course to existing educational programmes at our partnersincreasing the local embeddedness of the programme (=localizing and decolonizing), offer it as a refresher to alumni and/or as stand-alone course.

To experiment with other innovative types of learning , a Community of Practice (CoP) on CBM/citizen science (Communitor) has recently been launched. It brings together expertise from IOB & partners staff, students, alumni and external experts which allows creation of a global expertise network, strengthening the nexus education/research/outreach. 

The expectation is that this interactive platform will allow to establish a ‘local in global’ approach (exchange of localized knowledge among actors working on the same topic in different contexts) as well as to valorize other types of (student) knowledge and expertise, which could also be effectively done through the format of ‘microcredentials’.

Given the multinational/multicultural nature of our partnership various of the specific initiatives taken are (implicit) cases of culture-responsive evaluation (CRE). ICP CONNECT DEM aims to start a trajectory of reflection/exchange/action research on multi-perspective| multicultural|decolonizing |transformative M&E  that valorizes the experiences of the alumni barometer study in which a team of 16 alumni from different sectors, countries, gender and 2 staff members were engaged in a collaborative culture-responsive evaluation.