European Commission commends ATHENA consortium for sustainability of project results in Moldova

17-07-2017

As part of the Commission’s on-going monitoring of Tempus IV activities in the Partner Countries, a field monitoring visit took place between April and May 2017 in several different places in Moldova, among others, at the premises of Athena partners.

The National Tempus Office in Moldova met and discussed the results and impact of the project with theTempus project coordinator as well as local representatives of the Moldovan Institutions involved in the Athena Project. Below is the report received by EUA, as coordinator, from the Commission’s Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). ATHENA partners are called on maintaining links from their institutional websites to the ATHENA website to continue promoting the results of the project.

Analyses and roadmaps as well as HRM Toolkit are now available

The English versions of the ATHENA analyses and policy roadmaps of all three partner countries as well as the Human Resources Management (HRM) Toolkit have been finalised and can be downloaded under the material's section here.

The analyses and roadmaps are the outcome of a joint effort of the partner countries' delegations including partner universities, national rectors' conferences and the responsible ministries as well as EUA. The analysis based on the methodology of EUA's autonomy scorecard enriched with contextual information gathered in bilateral meetings between EUA and the partner countries' delegations shows the state of play of university autonomy at the beginning of the ATHENA project and also reflects the development over the past three years. The analysis is complemented by a policy roadmap including an action plan indicating the remaining challenges and proposing concrete steps to address those as well as the level of priority and feasibility for each. The exercise has helped to structure the dialogue between the Ministry and the universities in the three systems and shall also help to continue this in the future to facilitate further reforms and implementation.

Time for special thanks

While the ATHENA project is not quite over yet, with dissemination events planned by the different partners and project administration to be completed, the meetings of 15-17 September 2015 made for the the last occasion for the consortium to meet in plenary.

Therefore, the EUA team would like to take this opportunity to give its thanks to a number of special people who made the ATHENA journey such an unforgettable experience.

Many things in the project were made possible by the determination and reactiveness of three key people, the National Coordinators, who helped EUA coordinate action in Moldova, Ukraine and Armenia. These are of course Olesea Sirbu, Tatyana Trubchaninova and Menua Soghomonyan. They are to be particularly thanked, among many other tasks, for the hours they spent coordinating the project administration as well as the input of delegations to the analysis and the local organisation of project events.

Each national delegation in the project benefited from the commitment of highly engaged people, who contributed to the analysis of university autonomy in their country, and helped disseminate the project outcomes.