Chronic high-skilled workforce shortages in Bangladesh’s Public Health Sector are a formidable constraint to the nation’s sustainable human development. Primarily stemming from their Public Health programmes, HEI are unable to meet the priority skill demands of the sector’s NGOs, government agencies and other stakeholders. The academic learning model coupled with weak faculty teaching capacities, cannot equip graduates for the real-world professional skillsets to constructively engage community Public Health needs.BRACSPH, ICCCAD-IUB and AUW identified systemic challenges to their Public Health Curricula in the interrelated areas of course structure and underskilled faculty without professional development systems. In encountering faculty-centered, didactic lecture, rote-learning classrooms, students graduate without the competencies to professionally succeed. The partners recognize the economic imperative for Higher Education transformation to develop successive generations of professionals to positively impact the public health sector. Partners will ultimately invigorate their respective mandates of educational excellence, while averting the impending quality crisis across the Higher Education sector.It is therefore mission-critical to devise a multi-faceted solution to achieve the desired education outcomes for our valued students and future workforce. This model will be systemically redesigned around student learners’ competency development by introducing the following four interdependent components:1. Public Health Competency-based Curriculum 2. Public Health Learning Methodologies3. Faculty Facilitator Development 4. Faculty Professional Skills TrainingIt is only when these core Competency-based Curriculum features are integratively designed as an educational ecosystem that we will more fully realize our students’ innate potential and contributions in the Public Health sector.

Among many communities in the EU and beyond, disasters pose significant concerns and challenges, and are an issue that requires international cooperation and solutions. In the last three decades, records of natural disasters show that Asia experiences the most disasters. A major contributory factor to disaster risk is capacity. Capacity development is a widely recognised priority in the disaster resilience field, and research cooperation can provide significant opportunities for realising its benefits. Strengthening the capacity of countries in Asia to do and use research is widely viewed as vital for meeting long term innovation in creating disaster resilience societies. ASCENT (Advancing Skill Creation to ENhance Transformation) aims to ensure that the targeted HEIs in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Thailand have the research and innovative capacities to tackle the challenges associated with developing societal resilience to disasters. ASCENT will: 1) identify research and innovative capacity needs across partner country HEIs to tackle the development of societal resilience to disasters; 2) develop research infrastructure to support implementation of the project and provide sustainable capacity development within the partner HEIs ; 3) prepare researchers in the identified Asian countries to undertake advanced, world-class and innovative, multi- and inter-disciplinary research that will contribute to increased societal resilience to disasters; 4) Increase international cooperation by partner HEIs on research programmes that tackle ways to increase societal resilience to disasters; 5) explore, promote and initiate opportunities for fruitful university / industry partnerships to increase societal resilience to disasters; and 6) publicise the project progress, successes and outcomes as far as possible, and raise awareness across the field of HE about capacity building for disaster resilience research.

SoNAR-Global is a global consortium led by social scientists specializing in emerging infectious diseases (EID) and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). It will build a sustainable international social science network to engage the active participation of social sciences and promote complementarity and synergy in the governance of prevention and response to infectious threats and AMR. As such, it will become an integral part of emergency response. Partnering with major international and regional institutions, it will lead activities through a program that builds governance from the ground up. It will: • Develop an open-access platform to support the SoNAR-Global activities and to share them broadly. • Adapt, test, and evaluate vulnerability assessment tools on the ground and engagement models to facilitate collaboration across multiple stakeholders. • Create, pilot, and evaluate curricula for training social scientists in preparedness and response to infectious threats and through curricular development and piloting social science knowledge of infectious threats among non-social sciences actors.