It is over a year now that the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange has been a partner in the UniWeliS project. The objective of the project is to support the internationalisation of higher education through professionalising services for mobile academic staff. Since its foundation, NAWA has offered programmes that support the mobility of scientists, but also increase the universities’ potential to host foreigners. Thanks to UniWeliS, NAWA’s activities can be enhanced with the use of good practices and modular trainings in hosting foreign scientists that are developed under the project.

Other partners in the EU funded Erasmus+ project are: the Slovak Academic Information Agency (Slovakia) – the project coordinator, the Academic Cooperation Association (Belgium), Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski (Bulgaria), Comenius University (Slovakia), and the University of Niš (Serbia).

NAWA hosted a hybrid meeting of the UniWeliS project partners in its Warsaw headquarters on 7–8 April 2022. The partners presented the best from among 80 good practices in supporting academic staff’s mobility that had been gathered. Soon, this collection of interesting examples will become available in the form of an open-access application! Moreover, we used the meeting to develop a training manual for management staff at higher education and research institutions. The objective of these works, which are coordinated by NAWA, is to develop a model training in supporting the mobility of doctoral candidates and scientists. We believe that sharing knowledge in the form of good practices as well as model trainings will help us neutralise the barriers in scientists’ mobility that we identified at the diagnostic stage of the project (link here).

You can find out more about NAWA’s involvement in UniWeliS here.

An additional element of the meeting was a presentation of activities taken up by the project partners with the aim to support the academic community of Ukraine. As NAWA, we presented our activities under the initiative “Solidarity with Ukraine”.