‘EU students exchange programme promotes friendly ties’

The European Union said its Erasmus Programme which allows exchange visits by students to European and Nigerian universities encourages friendly ties among nations.

The Union’s International Policy Officer Deirdere Lennan made the remarks during the 7th International Conference on Quality Assurance in Higher Education in Africa recently in Abuja. She said with more than 800 students from more than 137 countries, Erasmus programme promotes intercultural and interdisciplinary exchange of students all over the world.

“Erasmus is the programme the European Union offer in collaboration with European and African universities and it gives an opportunity for students to be sent to Europe and vice-versa. It offers scholarships to students to do joint master degrees abroad and gives opportunity to universities to collaborate and work on new study programme or introduce new administrative units basically to modernize high education systems.”

She said Erasmus programme started a year ago, adding that “we used to have four different programmes covering different parts of the world but they were not cost effective and we decided to put them under one umbrella. So, Erasmus covers programmes in the fields of education, training, youths and sports in the European Union and also allows for all actions in higher education around the world.”

She

said

participation

is increasing for the joint master’s programme but “when you look at the huge number of students, we think Nigerian students can participate more. That means students have to look out for Erasmus Mundus joint degrees on the website. We hope to get about a hundred students for the joint master programme and 500 students to do short term mobility from Nigeria.”