Starting as of 2009 first liaison connections with the Ethiopian Ministry of Higher Education were established, resulting in comprehensive academic collaborations endorsed in a Memorandum of Understanding between GROUP T and the Ministry of Education of Ethiopia.
Under this agreement, GROUP T, and now KU Leuven – Campus Group T and GROUP T – Academy play a significant role in supporting newly established engineering faculties in Ethiopian universities with the development of their faculty members and implementation of their programmes, bearing great resemblance to the objectives of this application. Within the framework of this collaboration more than 60 scholarships junior faculty members have been welcomed from Addis Ababa Science and Technology University, Addis Ababa University, Aksum University, Dire Dawa University, Jimma University, Wollega University and Wollo University to receive graduate level training at Campus Group T. Currently there are already 27 alumni.
In 2012 and 2014 several staff members of Campus Group T joined Prof. De Graeve during his new prospective Ethiopian missions resulting in the signing of three new Memoranda of Understanding10 with the Universities of Dire Dawa, Aksum and Addis Ababa Science and Technology.
In replying to the current educational engineering requirements of capacity building at the Ethiopian universities, new talks with Ethiopian authorities from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Health were initiated. Only recently and endorsed by those two Ministries, the first pathway was rolled out towards a new Master’s in Health Engineering program, and clinical and biomedical engineering curricula tailored to the health care needs of Ethiopia were developed at KU Leuven – Campus Group T.
Recently, a 2-year joint student project was completed, in which Belgian and Ethiopian students showcased a best practice, aimed at capacity building on project based learning. More specifically, student teams from Campus Group T, Dire Dawa University and Aksum University designed an automated injera baking machine for the university campuses in Dire Dawa and Aksum. In the final stage of the project the student team from Campus Group T travelled to Ethiopia to assemble the machine together with the students from Dire Dawa and Aksum University. It is expected that project-based learning will be a crucial ingredient of the new postgraduate programs that will be established in the IoTs/STUs. This project shows that international collaboration can be a means of leveraging new types of learning and that there exists wide interest to participate in such initiatives.
Many former Ethiopian graduate students from KU Leuven – Campus Group T, pursued successful professional careers either as professors at universities in Ethiopia (Jimma, Dire Dawa, Wollo, Aksum University) or in international companies.