INQAAHE Talks on November 8, 2024

Towards an International Area for Higher Education

Nov 8, 2024 (Friday)
14:00 – 15:30 CET/UTC+1

The coming into force of the UNESCO Global Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications concerning Higher Education (GRC), currently ratified by 30 countries, is exercising the international education community to think about the possible implications of its wider adoption and implementation. These include the possibility of establishing an international higher education area, in a similar way to which the Lisbon Recognition Convention paved the way for the creation of a European Higher Education Area.

This INQAAHE Talk focused discussion on this scenario, involving key stakeholders who brought different perspectives about the requirements, opportunities, and challenges for the fuller realization of the GRC’s potential, and the eventual establishment of an international higher education area.

We heard the inter-governmental perspective from UNESCO, the international quality assurance perspective from INQAAHE, and the qualification recognition perspective from the ENIC-NARIC network.

Can the GRC underpin the development of an international higher education area? What would this look like? What would be required from the international education community to get there? How feasible would that be? What are the key challenges and opportunities? These are some of the questions that informed the discussion.

The recording of this session is available on INQAAHE’s YouTube channel.

The following speakers joined us in this session:

Borhene Chakroun

Borhene Chakroun is Director of the Policies and Lifelong Learning Systems Division at UNESCO, where his expertise lies in driving global education and training agenda in the context of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Recognized for his contributions to the field of skills development and lifelong learning, he has authored and co-authored numerous articles and books.

His recent work includes analyzing education reform trends and shaping the global direction for skills development through the twin digital and green transitions, within the framework of the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda. Borhene spearheads UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition, a critical initiative that mobilizes multi-stakeholder collaboration to accelerate progress towards SDG4, respond in crises, and enable equitable digital transformation in education and training systems.

Prior to his work with UNESCO, Borhene served in pivotal roles as a trainer, chief trainer, and project manager. His experience includes consultancy work with the EU, World Bank, and various international organizations. He contributed significantly as a Senior Human Capital Development Specialist for the European Training Foundation (ETF) after joining in 2001. An engineer by training, Borhene earned a Ph.D. in Education Sciences from Bourgogne University in France.

Fabrice Hénard

Mr. Fabrice Hénard is the CEO of INQAAHE. He is a global expert in tertiary education and quality assurance as an evaluator, trainer, facilitator or policy advisor. He brings to INQAAHE the experience he gained working for The French Evaluation Agency for Research and Higher Education and the OECD Tertiary Education Program. As an expert, he has carried out more than 100 assignments for Unesco, World Bank, OECD, European Union, tertiary education institutions, ministries, university networks in some 45 countries and has chaired several expert panels in Europe and the Mena region. Since 2013, he is the Secretary General of the Accreditation Committee of Luxembourg, education expert for the European Commission and he was a member of the Albanian Accreditation Committee 2017-2022. He leads the modules on Education Policy in the South at Sciences Po Paris, Master in International Development.

Dr. Andreas Corcoran

Deputy Secretary General, International Association of Universities. Dr Corcoran is a keen believer in the transformative power of higher education. Therefore, he is proud to contribute to the IAU’s mission to strengthening the role of higher education in society. As Deputy Secretary General, he is part of the Association’s institutional and strategic development. Next to his management responsibilities, he leads the IAU Executive Leadership Programme (ELP) for university presidents and is in charge of the IAU’s work on the World Higher Education Database (whed.net) listing all accredited higher education institutions in the world. Prior to joining the IAU, Dr Corcoran was Director of Higher Education at SOFIA in Rome, Italy and oversaw the financial, academic and institutional development of Jordan University College in Morogoro, Tanzania.

Dr Corcoran has worked at the University of Kent in the UK, the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation and the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Dr Corcoran has written and lectured on university management, history and epistemic culture and holds a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (EUI) and a Masters from Trinity College Dublin and studied in Berlin, Rome and London.

Chiara Finocchietti

Chiara Finocchietti is Director of CIMEA – NARIC Italia. Geographer, she comes from the world of research, is an expert in the evaluation of qualifications and higher education systems, and is author of various publications on the subject of credential evaluation credential evaluation, ethics in education, recognition of refugees qualifications, micro-credentials, transnational education, digitalisation and artificial intelligence. She is the current President of the ENIC Network.