The World Bank (WB) funded Higher Education Development in Pakistan (HEDP) project, being executed by the Higher Education Commission, held its 10th WB supervision mission for the project in Islamabad.
HEDP is a 400 million USD flagship project of HEC aimed to support research excellence in strategic sectors of the economy, improve teaching and learning, and strengthen governance in higher education.
Spread over a week, detailed meetings were held on each of the six components of HEDP project to review progress, including safeguards and fiduciary aspects.
The WB team, led by Ms. Inga Afanasieva, a Senior Economist at the World Bank, held an introductory meeting with the Chairman HEC Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed. He assured the team that HEC is committed to successful execution of the project. The Chairman also offered HEC support for hosting the World Bank’s next South Asia Regional Cooperation event on quality assurance in Pakistan, so that neighboring countries work together to share and adopt the best practices.
Executive Director HEC Dr. Zia Ul-Qayyum, along with the Project Coordinator Mr. Awais Ahmed chaired the kick-off meeting. The Executive Director highlighted that the project missions are important as they help track progress, document lessons learnt and work as checkpoints for the project. He said that the project targets are being closely monitored for their timely completion.
HEC and WB teams reviewed the progress of each component. Both sides agreed on the next steps that will ensure that every opportunity should be availed to support the higher education sector during the remaining project lifespan. The HEDP team presented that the overall project progress is 91%.
The project has awarded 142 research grants including 43 first-ever public sector innovator seed funds. It has built capacity of 4428 faculty members of affiliated colleges on revised Undergraduate Education Policy (UEP), facilitated roll out of UEP nationally, and established 41 quality enhancement cells in the affiliated colleges.
The project also enhanced access of Pakistan Education Research Network (PERN) to additional 133 higher education institutions (HEIs). PERN is a high-speed internet bundled with key educational software managed by HEC for HEIs. PERN has now been spread to 400+ HEIs with around 100 GB bandwidth. Under the project, several mega IT initiatives for the sector are also launched including robust student information systems for public sector universities, state-of-the-art data centres and high-performance computing.
Some notable project grant outcomes include 204 journal publications, 127 conference publications, 15 patents, 144 research events, seven spinoffs, 24 awards/recognition, 25 tech partnership licenses, and input for 17 policy-level developments.
The National Academy of Higher Education (NAHE), in addition to carrying out several capacity-building programmes, trained 196 women leaders across Pakistan, many of whom are now rising in the management cadres. NAHE team also shared the three-tier training planned to be conducted for HEIs across Pakistan very soon.
Ms. Inga Afanasieva emphasized WB’s commitment to supporting the Pakistani higher education sector via this project. She expressed her satisfaction with project performance and also reaffirmed the commitment to extending support to key areas, including NAHE, affiliated colleges, financial autonomy of universities, and faculty training during the last year. Focusing on improving gender participation, she encouraged the project team to enhance female participation at all levels.