The University has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with North South University (NSU), Bangladesh’s first private higher education institution. The MoU, the first of its kind between Kent and a university in Bangladesh, exemplifies commitment to academic collaboration to address the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
The partnership will focus on collaboration in delivering Kent’s new MSc in Development Economics but will also bring wider opportunities for staff exchange and joint academic activity.
An immediate goal of the MoU is to enable students from Kent’s MSc Economics programmes to travel to Bangladesh for their dissertation research, for data collection and analysis under joint supervision by Kent’s School of Economics and the Department of Economics at NSU.
Bangladesh is among the countries where the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) faces some of its most difficult challenges but also where some of the most impressive SDG gains are being made. Those SDGs of focus in the MoU include reducing poverty, improving education opportunities and economic participation for women, and tackling climate change; particularly flooding.
Dr Anthony Manning, Dean of Internationalisation for the University of Kent, said: ‘The University of Kent is pleased to see this MoU signed with North South University, demonstrating the international enthusiasm for academic collaboration that is an advancing force in so many vital areas of development. The benefits of shared research and teaching will become most apparent in the further steps made towards success with the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals.’
The MoU also opens up opportunities for collaboration in teaching and collaboration for a number of other disciplines between both institutions including Political Science, Law, Environmental Science, Biosciences and Computing.