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HAMK collaborating to advance green transition in Southeast Asia

7.3.2025

We want to build a more sustainable future through higher education in Southeast Asia.

We officially launched a new project GreenEdAsia – Learning for Sustainable Future – Higher Education for Green Transition in Southeast Asia in February. Our partners organised a kick-off and Future Foresight workshop week in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam. This marks a significant milestone in advancing the green transition in Southeast Asian higher education, laying the foundation for a modern and sustainable academic system. The significance of the launch of this capacity building project was highlighted by the presence of the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and the European Union.

Our project consortium consists of universities from Vietnam, Finland, Spain, and Thailand. We collaborate to promote sustainable development through higher education in Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asian partners will redesign curricula in circular bioeconomy fields in order to provide more skilled workforce for the industry. The project consists of Foresight work, teacher education, as well as student challenges all while strengthening capacities of partner universities through academic and management staff workshops.

This project embodies exactly what we, as the European Union, aim to achieve through the Capacity Building in Higher Education (CBHE) action of Erasmus+.

Ms. Kristina Buende, Head of Cooperation, European Union Delegation to Vietnam

We also had a chance to collaborate with industry representatives on the future scenarios of their industries. 30 teachers, teacher educators, administrative staff and industry representatives gathered with the common agenda to create future scenarios for their organisations. These scenarios will be used when creating competence profiles to guide the revision of the partner universities’ curricula.

Our project teams will continue the foresight work and prepare for the teacher training workshop in Finland. During the workshop the teachers will be introduced to innovative teaching and learning methodologies which they can include in the revised curricula. These methods will be piloted in the south Asian partner universities with students. In addition, and simultaneously to the teacher training and foresight work, we will organise a manager visit in Spain. This is done to strengthen their capacity to carry out development processes.

The project is not the first time we have collaborated with the coordinator HCMUTE. This is a continuation for 10 years of collaboration through projects like EMVITET. EMVITET concentrated on increasing student-centered and competence-based education. A clear sign of the continuous collaboration was when during the workshop our staff had the privilege to interview two exchange students from HAMK currently studying in HCMUTE for the semester.