Globalisation has accelerated the pace of internationalisation of higher education (IoHE) worldwide, including our 3 target countries in the South Asian (SA) region, Afghanistan (AF), India (IN) and Nepal (NP). The globalised market requires graduates to have international (int’l), foreign language and intercultural skills to communicate with int’l clients. Higher education institutions (HEIs) plays a critical role in preparing and facilitating a skilled, knowledge workforce, they are placing more importance on internationalisation. However, SA, home to a 25% of the world’s population & a youthful region with more than 600 million people under 18 (UNICEF 2015), has failed to respond to the demand on IoHE. The poor internationalisation practices in the region may jeopardise the socio-economic development by unfulfilling the preparation of students’ employability & limiting the int’l profile of the HEIs. MERGE has taken an endogenous approach to address the challenges. It commences with a benchmarking exercise to standardise internationalisation practice alongside 2 study visits to EU. After that, it equips 366 people (incl. non-consortium partners) via 6 trainings and 6 English courses to develop strategic goals for both IROs and institutions until 2025. Meanwhile, 5 national activities will be organised to promote IROs’ services, e.g. 6 mobility weeks and 6 video filmed. To enhance the student mobility services, 1 guideline will be developed which can be adapted by 6 PC HEIs and other HEIs. A 45-member regional network will be established to encourage regional cooperation and integration. To increase MERGE exposure on the international platform, 2 international conferences will be organised to stimulate cooperation and dialogue. The sustainability and long-term impact of MERGE is ensured by enhanced institutional capacity and engaging non-consortium partners.

This is a capacity building initiative involving 5 EU partners (of which 4 HEIs) from Bulgaria, Greece, Finland and UK, and 10 Partner Country (PC) universities: 4 from India, 2 from Philippines, 2 from Nepal and 2 from Sri Lanka.Its overall objective is to build the capacity of PC HEIs to embed graduates' employability in their core activities and to facilitate the development of student talent through co-curricular and extra-curricular innovation activities involving key stakeholders, with a view to contributing to youth employment, inclusive growth and sustainable development.The project has the following specific objectives:-To support the uptake and mainstreaming of entrepreneurship education and innovation training in PC HEIs and to promote the integration of talent development into research and innovation activities in collaboration with external stakeholders (enterprises, non-profits, public sector)-To create sustainable institutional structures and ICT tools enabling student co-creation in research and innovation and stakeholder co-creation in talent development-To build PC HEIs’ capacities for delivering innovation and entrepreneurship training in view of building students’ employability skills.The capacity building intervention has three key dimensions: - enabling an institutional culture of strategic planning and change in the direction of improving the relevance of education- launching Talent Co-Creation Labs for co-curricular and extracurricular live projects combining student and stakeholder co-creation in innovation and engaging students with the world outside the university- developing tools and teaching resources to support staff and faculty implementing the new tasks.All dimensions seek to enable a re-design of students’ learning experience, introduce a challenge-driven learning model, improve graduates’ employability skills, strengthen PC HEIs’ interactions with business, and involve external stakeholders in student talent development.