Long-term university cooperation in an age of ever shorter projects cycles

By Nina Volles

This year, I had the privilege of serving on the selection committee for the VLIRUOS Institutional University Cooperation (IUC) call that will launch new twelve-year partnerships in 2026. With the results now public, it feels like an important moment to step back and reflect on what this process reveals about long-term higher education cooperation, and what it tells us about the state of equitable North-South partnerships today.

What makes the IUC model stand out

VLIRUOS is the Flemish organisation that supports scholarships and partnerships between higher education institutions in Flanders and partner universities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with a clear focus on global sustainable development. Within this landscape, the Institutional University Cooperation (IUC) programme is distinctive. An IUC partnership:

· spans up to twelve years (phase in, two main phases and a phase out)

· provides an annual budget of around 600,000 euros

· strengthens a partner university as a whole institution, not only through isolated projects

· integrates thematic subprojects in education and research with broader institutional strengthening in governance, management, services and systems.

In practical terms, this makes IUC one of the very few funding mechanisms that still invests in long-term, institution-wide transformation. At a time when much development cooperation is dominated by three-year projects, pilots and quick consultancies, this kind of commitment is increasingly rare – and incredibly valuable.

Why long-term institutional partnerships still matter

It is easy to talk about “capacity development” in abstract terms. The IUC format forces a much more concrete question: what does it actually take for a university to become a stronger driver of change in its region, and how long does that realistically take?

Up to twelve years is not a luxury. It is the time needed to:

· develop and implement new curricula, and see at least a few cohorts of graduates

· build research groups with critical mass, infrastructure and credentials

· change internal systems for finance, human resources, procurement, ethics or data

· grow a new generation of academic leaders and administrators

· build trust with communities, authorities and other local actors

Short projects can pilot innovations. They rarely change institutions. Long term cooperation, if designed well, can. For that reason, I believe development actors should actively defend formats such as IUC. They are demanding and complex, but they help build systems, not just outputs.

A demanding two stage selection process

The IUC 2026 selection process had two formal stages, both involving the same selection committee of external experts working with VLIRUOS staff and Flemish and partner institutions.

To simplify a complex process, it looked roughly as follows.

Stage	Focus	Role of the selection committee
Stage 1	Expression of interest and commitment	Assess institutional fit with IUC, strategic vision, track record and readiness for a long-term partnership. Recommend which institutions should develop a full concept note.
Stage 2	Concept note and consortium building	Assess the detailed concept note, partnership set up and expected change pathways. Conduct a final comparative assessment, including live presentations and question and answer sessions in Brussels.

By the time projects reached Stage 2, each team had invested an enormous amount of work. Proposals were not just “applications” in the usual sense. They contained:

· institutional analyses and theories of change

· draft portfolios of subprojects

· reflection on governance and management arrangements

· first ideas on monitoring, evaluation and learning

· risk assessments and partnership principles

On top of that, VLIRUOS organised an information session, ongoing support and, at the end, an in person moment in Brussels where Flemish and partner university teams presented their work and responded to questions from the committee. Sitting in that room, months after the first online readings and discussions, it was hard not to think about the invisible labour behind each concept note: internal consultations, negotiations between faculties, evenings of writing and redrafting, the emotional investment of people who see this as a once in a generation opportunity for their institutions. Throughout this process, the VLIRUOS team worked with great professionalism and care, holding together a demanding timeline, a complex system of checks and balances, and an unusually intensive form of accompaniment for both Flemish and partner institutions.

Quality, not “weeding out”

One of the strongest impressions from the process was the overall quality and seriousness of the proposals. By Stage 2, there were no “weak” projects. The proposals that did not make it into the final set were often coherent, ambitious and deeply rooted in local needs. They would likely count as flagship initiatives in many other funding schemes.

This is worth stating clearly. We did not spend our time weeding out bad projects. We faced the much more uncomfortable task of differentiating among good ones, in a context of limited resources. The committee had to work within a pre-defined funding envelope and a clear framework. VLIRUOS emphasises that proposals must meet quality thresholds and be judged against a common set of criteria, rather than through purely budget-driven arithmetic. That discipline is important for fairness, but it does not make the choices easier.

Responsibility, bias and equitable partnerships

Serving on a committee with up to twelve-year consequences is not a neutral technical exercise. It is a responsibility that sits at the intersection of expertise, values and power. VLIRUOS has a robust selection system. There are clear criteria, conflict of interest procedures, and guidelines that insist on justification of each decision. This is essential. At the same time, procedures alone cannot remove the structural asymmetries that are built into North–South cooperation. A few reflections stood out for me:

a)    Excellence looks different in different contextsMost of the institutions in this call operate in conditions that Flemish universities simply do not face: volatile currencies, political pressures, historical inequalities, legacies of conflict or displacement, the constraints of economic sanctions or the deep marginalisation of particular regions and peoples. Evaluating proposals from such different realities requires constant interrogation of one’s own lenses.

b)    Equitable partnership must be more than a sloganThe IUC programme is formally demand oriented and aims to strengthen partner universities based on their own institutional priorities. However, selection and funding decisions still sit within a European funding architecture.For partnerships to be genuinely equitable, several elements are crucial:

· co-design of agendas rather than pre-defined “Northern” themes

· recognition that knowledge and innovation flow in all directions, not only from Flemish institutions to partners

· governance arrangements that give strong decision-making power to partner universities

· explicit attention to epistemic justice, for example by valuing indigenous and local knowledge alongside other forms of expertise.

Reading the proposals, it was encouraging to see how many teams already work in this spirit: Amazonian universities foregrounding indigenous knowledge and environmental stewardship; coastal institutions linking marine ecosystems and community livelihoods; universities in refugee hosting regions structuring their work around the needs and agency of both host and displaced populations.

c)     Capacity is not a one-way streetIt is tempting to talk about “capacity strengthening in the South” as if Flemish institutions do not change through these partnerships. The IUC experience, including previous generations of partnerships, shows the opposite: Flemish universities learn new approaches to community engagement, develop new research questions, rethink their own curricula and confront their own institutional blind spots. Any serious reflection on equitable partnership has to treat this as central, not incidental.

The six selected partnerships and their themes

Against this backdrop, six universities and their Flemish partners have now entered the phase in period that will prepare full IUC programmes as of 2026.

Partner university	Country	Indicative theme (short description)
Universidad de Holguín (UHo)	Cuba	Smart services for national development, focusing on smart energy, smart agriculture and smart governance to tackle challenges in energy, water and agriculture.
Technical University of Mombasa (TUM)	Kenya	One Health for Kenyan coastal communities, linking human, animal and marine health, blue economy and applied engineering for more sustainable coastal livelihoods.
Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana (UNAP)	Peru	Sustainable resource management and inclusive development in the Amazon, including health, food security, climate resilience and women’s empowerment in vulnerable communities.
Universidad Técnica del Norte (UTN)	Ecuador	Empowering marginalised urban and rural communities in Imbabura through inclusive, locally rooted innovation and stronger community-university linkages.
Gulu University	Uganda	Sustainable agri-food systems for inclusive socio-economic transformation in refugee host communities in Northern Uganda, from climate smart production to value addition and conflict sensitive governance.
Nelson Mandela University (NMU)	South Africa	SEALIFER: human-ocean relations and coastal justice, working with marginalised coastal communities on livelihoods, heritage, climate change and intersectional inequalities.

Each of these partnerships is anchored in a specific territory and community. None can be reduced to a generic “capacity development” story. They are about coastal towns and fishing communities, Amazonian forests and rivers, highland cities and peri-urban neighbourhoods, refugee host districts, and coastal regions shaped by long histories of inequality and resistance. They are also about Flemish universities that will work over many years with these partners and hopefully allow their own priorities and practices to be influenced in the process.

Selection committees and the politics of comparison

One of the most difficult aspects of the process, for me personally, was the act of comparison. The selection system asks committees to apply a common framework of criteria across all proposals. That is necessary for fairness, but it can also obscure important differences. For example:

· Some universities operate in systems with relatively stable public funding, others in environments where base funding is precarious

· Some are located in cities with dense networks of civil society and private sector actors, others in more isolated regions

· Some proposals build on previous IUC or Network experiences, others are first time entrants to this type of cooperation

The committee discussed these issues at length trying to resist simplistic notions of merit and to take context seriously, while still respecting the rules of the game. This is where decolonial reflection matters. If North–South funding instruments are to move beyond reproducing existing hierarchies, they need selection processes that explicitly acknowledge structural inequalities and that invite evaluators to question their own default expectations. VLIRUOS has taken important steps in that direction through its guidelines, its insistence on transparent feedback, and the composition of its commissions.

What this means for the wider development and higher education community

From a broader perspective, the IUC process raises questions that concern all actors who care about higher education and development.

a)      Defending long-term formats- If long-term institutional cooperation is to survive, it needs strong champions. Ministries, development agencies, and philanthropic foundations often face pressure to demonstrate quick, visible results. Programmes like IUC, with their longer horizons and more complex change pathways, do not always fit comfortably with these expectations. Yet if we want universities to play a meaningful role in just and sustainable transitions, we have to invest in the slow work of changing curricula, research systems, governance and community relations. That cannot be done through a sequence of disconnected projects.

b)      Reframing “capacity” and “impact”- Equitable partnerships require us to rethink familiar concepts. “Capacity” should not be read as a deficit in the South to be compensated by expertise from the North. It should be understood as the combined ability of institutions to learn, adapt and act together. Similarly, “impact” in a twelve-year programme is not just a set of quantitative indicators. It is also about who sets the agenda, whose knowledge counts, and what kinds of futures are being imagined and made possible.

c)       Strengthening the ethics of evaluation- Finally, as someone who works a great deal on evaluation and learning, I came away from the committee experience with renewed respect for the ethics of selection. Commission members make decisions that they cannot fully know the consequences of. This makes humility, transparency, and continuous learning critical. VLIRUOS has put substantial thought into its selection system and code of conduct. external experts, we also carry a responsibility to reflect critically on our own role: how we read proposals, how we interpret silence or uncertainty, which kinds of evidence we privilege, and how we talk about institutions that are not selected.

A personal closing reflection

Being part of the IUC 2026 selection committee has been both a privilege and a challenge. I feel honoured to have contributed to a process that will shape six substantial partnerships over the coming decade, and I am equally conscious of the projects that did not make it into the final set. What stays with me most are not the scores or matrices, but the institutional stories behind the proposals: teams working through evenings and weekends to align their colleagues; leaders trying to balance immediate pressures with long-term vision; communities placing their hopes in universities that are trying to become more responsive and more just.

For those reasons, I want to thank VLIRUOS for its trust in the committee, and for maintaining a programme that still takes long-term institutional partnership seriously. I also want to acknowledge the immense work of all the universities and Flemish partners involved, both selected and non-selected.

As the six partnerships move through the phase in period and begin to implement their programmes, I look forward to seeing not only what changes in Cuba, Kenya, Peru, Ecuador, Uganda, and South Africa, but also how the Flemish institutions and VLIRUOS themselves continue to learn and evolve. That, ultimately, is what equitable partnership requires: transformation on all sides.