"The project presented pretends to create a Regional Observatory for Quality and Equity in Higher Education in Latin America (ORACLE). The project is based on the assumption that there is no possible quality without equity. For it, the project involves the participation of 35 universities from 15 countries from Latin America and 5 European countries. It will be developed for 36 months from 2016 to 2019.ORACLE is an innovative project although it seeks to give continuity and sustainability to 4 ALFA.3 projects supported by the EU. In order to achieve an optimal function of the Observatory, previously, it is going to be built a Quality and Equity Unit (UCE) in each one of the 30 universities that participate in the project. These UCE's will propose and design actions, policies and strategies of institutional quality assurance and equity. Likewise, these institutional units will operate in a reticulated way and they will be the starter point and the main emphasis of ORACLE. The creation of new structures will encourage the Organizational Development of the Higher Education institutions of ""la Región"".The groups in vulnerable situation that ORACLE's Observatory is focused on are a total of eight: indigenous people, women, people with disabilities, non- traditional students, population with very low HDI, immigrants, ethnic minority groups and citizens from rural areas. ORACLE aims to provide an integral and integrated service and, unlike other initiatives, it is not exclusively circumscribed on the academic development of the students, but it will also work with people in vulnerable situations among all levels (professors, students, administrative staff and managers) and all institutional functions: teaching, research and management."

The European Latin American Network in Support of Social Entrepreneurs (ELANET) has the ambition to become a leading platform in support of social entrepreneurs (SEs). This project will lead partner universities to implement an IT-based platform that consolidates already existing tools, resources, and coaching material for SEs. Our consortium involves 17 project partners (among which 4 European Universities and 12 Latin American Universities) and 35 associated partners. Through ELANET they will: - Develop and implement an international platform in support of SEs (in English) with 7 modules with seven modules: 1. SE cases to inspire, 2. SEs in need of support, 3. Support Partners, 4. Volunteers, 5. Tools for mentors, 6. Tools for SEs, and 7. Library with relevant articles and books.;- Exchange best practices for the support of SEs;- Make an inventory of available materials and tools;- Intensify the (inter)national collaboration among SEs, and between SEs, HEIs and network partners to attract resources (funding, coaching, volunteers);- Stimulate the internationalization of SEs, and their solutions to social challenges. The consortium undertakes this project because of all partner HEIs commitment to support SEs from their local communities. We refer here to the third and fourth mission of universities, with their active contribution to society, in addition to teaching and research. In the context of this project, most HEIs lack of a consolidated network of partners and programs of extracurricular activities to support SEs due to their complex coordination. Five years after the project (by 2028), ELANET’s goal is to be adopted by at least 100 universities from 20 countries, engaging 3.000 professors and 20.000 students in support of 5.000 social entrepreneurs. It is our ambition, supported by the crowdsourcing and transdisciplinary methodology of the project, to sustain ELANET over time and reach far beyond those numbers in support of social entrepreneurs.

Although Latin American society has gained greater access to education at all levels, government officials in education, schoolteachers, trainers and researchers are calling into question the ability of their higher education institutions (HEIs) to address education professionals' needs. Typically, such groups criticize the bureaucracy of HEI training programmes, their failure to address practice as well as theory and the lack of commitment to society. Regional meetings between education specialists have identified other weaknesses in these programmes, including the following: the poor development of trainees’ professional skills; inadequate training in civic values, competencies for the globalized world and ITC skills; and, in general, the failure to engage in curricular reform). To address the situation, the 2021 Education Goals adopted in 2008 by education ministers in Ibero‐America prioritized “strengthening the teaching profession”.The interuniversity TO-INN Programme adopts a systemic approach to ensuring quality in HEI programmes for trainee educators. It does this by prioritizing the development of programmes with socially and professionally relevant teaching content that encourage trainee educators to play an active role in their learning and make institutions more innovative in policymaking. the Programme comprises 22 institutions from a total of 12 countries (16 institutions from Latin America and six from the EU). The TO-INN Programme is organized along four axes: 1) Culture and tradition; 2) Citizenship and participation; 3) Social cohesion and 4) Digital culture. Taking Spanish as its common language, TO-INN aims to promote well-fundamented changes in university training programmes by creating a virtual platform for collaborative work and learning. This platform will be used to revise curricula structures and frameworks, develop teaching and learning strategies and create a network for HEIs to ensure relevance in curricula content.

Peru, Mexico, and Bolivia, as well as other Latin-American countries, hold a vast and rich documentary and bibliographic collections. Preserving and enhancing those collections are key drivers to highlight the complex process to gather and create them, and to further know and maintain the identity and culture of different peoples. However, most of these collections are not well kept, due partly to the lack of specific skills of personnel in charge of keeping it. This differs from Europe where Universities have developed specific curricula to cover this need, and are actively cooperating with other institutions such as libraries to preserve all the document heritage. Hence, our project CODICIS seeks to design, implement and test a specialization course to preserve and manage heritage documentary collections. CODICIS also intends to create or improve labs at the HEIs to preserve and restore document and archive collections. We have set several specific objectives: - To develop a pedagogical and scientific methodology to analyse and intervene the state of documents and bibliographic collections with heritage content- Knowledge transfer from EU HEIs about preserving bibliographic heritage- Capacity building on criteria to preserve, describe, classify and catalogue documentary and library heritage materials. - Providing equipment to the partner HEIs for the correct preservation and academic use of cultural heritage materialsThe project will last 36 months. It will be coordinated by Universidad Católica San Pablo from Arequipa (Peru), involving other 9 partners from Italy, Spain, Mexico, Peru and Bolivia.

Institutional weakness and the lack of territorial management instruments and mechanisms is one of the main problems faced by local , departmental and national governments in Latin America in the field of management and development of rural territories. To face this situation, initiatives to be taken must necessarily include research on management and territorial development mechanisms at municipal level, the dissemination of good management practices of territorial development and mostly the diffusion of new ideas and postgraduate training under a pragmatic pedagogical approach focused on action and case studies.EARTH project addresses the lack of skilled human resources and to the weakness of training programs in HEIs related to rural development management and planning. Overall objective is to capitalise the experience of EU partners, in view of enhancing the management, governance, teaching, research and outreach capacities of PC HEIs’ to reinforce their role in the promotion and management of processes of local rural development. This will allow to better align PC HEIs research and teaching activities with pressing local socio-economic challenges and key national development goals related to rural development and to become better integrated into their external environment and be better positioned to contribute to local economic growth of the rural sector. These objectives will be realized also through an online library, a white book summarizing and presenting a repertory of good practices, a method manual, online workshops and international courses for putting in common educational programs, quality assurance procedures, teaching materials, and to improve them with input from society in terms of required skills and jobs in rural development topics. As a result, the promotion of homogenization dynamics affecting educational patterns will improve international cooperation ability and effectiveness supporting the efforts played at national and regional levels.