Nelva Sixpene (academic Champion UniLúrio)
Professor and Director of Optometry Course at UniLúrio.
PhD student in Public Health at ENSP-NOVA, Lisbon, Portugal
1- What have been the main challenges of the participation in the UDI-Africa (individually and institutionally)?
·” Individually – I felt an enormous responsibility, since there were many candidates to fill the vacancies; Need to learn everything to be able to transmit knowledge to colleagues at UniLúrio.
· Institutionally – leave the projects you were doing to pursue new skills.”
2– What are the main opportunities from UDI-Africa in the present and for future?
“At present: the possibility of sharing experiences between African and European universities; create more interaction between African Universities in order to find areas of collaboration.
In the future: opportunity to share achievements between universities; ability to recognize internal resources to make improvements in organic units through CADI´s.”
3- What has been and will be the main impact of UDI-Africa for your individual professional development?
“The main impact for my individual and professional development was the PhD I am now doing. For those in Africa, doing a PhD in Europe seems almost unattainable, but after getting to know the different organizations thanks to the UDI- I had the possibility to qualify for a PhD that I am very happy to do.”
4- What has been and will be the main impact of UDI-Africa for your institution’s academic development?
“I think that this must have been the biggest impact of UDI-A because in my institution each faculty worked for itself with its goals that were sometimes similar to other units, with the creation of CADI, a center that was suggested by UDI-A now the resources are used in order to benefit most units, maximizing the results through multidisciplinarity. “