Editorial
11 Mar 2011
Dear readers,
The year 2011 is going to be an interesting year for the NICHE and NFP programmes, and their future. This year several crucial decisions will be taken. At the moment of writing this editorial the new list of partner countries of Dutch development cooperation is about to be published. There will be a reduction of partner countries receiving bilateral aid from the Netherlands. It is not yet clear what consequences this will have for the country lists of both NICHE and NFP. As soon as more details become available we will publish them on our website.
The future of NICHE and NFP
This year will also see the start of a policy discourse on the future of the two programmes. An extremely important topic will be the budgets that will be available from 2012 onwards. We hope this will become clear before the summer break.
Meeting the Minister
A start of the policy discourse will be a discussion between Ben Knapen, Minister for European Affairs and International Cooperation, and a high-level delegation of higher education associations in the Netherlands (VSNU and HBO-raad), professional organizations PIE, Profound, SAIL and Nuffic. This discussion was scheduled for early March, but has been postponed by the ministry due to agenda constraints. More technical consultations will be held this year.
External evaluations
Finally, an external evaluation of NPT, NICHE and NFP is scheduled for the summer of 2011. Together, these ingredients will lead to a long-term redesign of Dutch international higher education programmes.
Commitment freeze lifted
In this newsletter you will find interesting reading material about recent developments in our programmes. The commitment freeze was lifted early January. Therefore, we are happy to publish again new NICHE subsidy tenders and update our project pipeline.
Scholarships Online
Another important milestone was the first NFP application deadline for which we used Scholarships Online (SOL).
TVET in NICHE
In this issue you can also read more about Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in NICHE. TVET is an important policy objective of NICHE. It has been elaborated in a policy paper and is addressed through specific activities, such as the upcoming seminar in Utrecht on 24 March.
I hope you enjoy the read.
Best regards,
Joep Houterman
Director Capacity Building & Scholarships
Partiner Countries