Ten members of UNamur's academic and scientific staff, accompanied by the International Relations Department and the NGO FUCID, the University Forum for International Development Cooperation, took part in an exploratory mission co-organized with UCAD. The mission was part of the university's drive to strengthen partnerships with the South, by promoting exchanges, raising researchers' awareness of the issues facing the global South, and helping new projects to emerge.
For a week, several activities were organized to enable members of the delegation to discover the Senegalese university: a visit to UCAD and discovery of its issues, exchanges around the concept of "One Health", meetings between researchers, a field visit and a closing moment in the presence of institutional partners.
Catherine Linard, professor at the Faculty of Sciences, was part of the Namur delegation "Going on site and exchanging with our Senegalese colleagues is very important. It allows us to discover the wealth of their research, in fields often directly connected to realities on the ground," she explains.
Since 2015, Catherine Linard has been collaborating with UCAD, notably as part of a research and development project supported by ARES. "From this initial collaboration a number of dynamics were born. Several Senegalese PhD students have come to Belgium to pursue their research. And conversely, one of my Belgian PhD students, Camille Morlighem, who is working on the creation of malaria risk maps in Senegal, has been able to benefit from mobility grants for research stays at UCAD. We've also established teaching exchanges: I went to Dakar to give a week's training to PhD students in geography, and a fellow health geographer, Aminata Niang Diène, comes to Belgium every year to speak in one of my master's courses," continues the professor.
