Mid-term project monitoring: what emerges about CONTAN work-in-progress

Last January the 24th a project monitoring visit took place in Tanzania to assess the implementation and management strategy followed by the project teams in order to reach the project’s objectives, and the progress made in its implementation.
CBHE, Capacity Building in Higher Education, aims to promote voluntary convergence of HEI systems in the partner countries with EU policies and processes in higher education. Therefore, special attention is paid to the European dimension of the project and how it addresses the Bologna action lines (European Credit Transfer System – ECTS).
Key actors were included from the project teams and target groups: Università degli Studi di Firenze, College of African Wildlife and Conservation MWEKA, Univesrity of Dar Es Salaam and Sokoine University of Agricolture.

The main issues addressed were:

• ORGANISATION OF THE PROJECT TEAMS within the partnership, in terms of decision making bodies, distribution, responsibility and monitoring of tasks and involvement in different work packages, stability of the teams and internal and external communication methods
• SHARING OF CARRIED OUT ACTIVITIES AND ACHIEVED RESULTS compared to the original application in terms of timing, nature and quality of the outputs produced so far, with a focus on methodology of project implementation that had been agreed on during the kick-off meeting
• IMPACT AND VISIBILITY of the project in the partner country institutions and their local/regional/national environments, including aspects related to the project dissemination and sustainability strategy and to the activities carried out so far in this respect.

Monitoring and evaluation with the EU representative though was not the only point of views the CONTAN team was interested in. We value as well to hear the opinion and voices from target groups, in particular students taking advantage from these educational opportunities.
So we collected some interviews sharing voices from the field. Here is what they told us.