UNL and UNESCO-IHE partnership brings international ag, water opportunities

Nineteen students from across the globe will arrive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in May to participate in the inaugural offering of a field methods course that will be part of a new international education partnership.

UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, based in Delft, Netherlands, and UNL are partnering to combine the strong hydraulic engineering and international water management experience of IHE with the strong crop and large-scale production system expertise at UNL.

"We will bring our expertise and combine it with their expertise and interactions across the world," said Ed Harvey, a UNL faculty member who volunteered along with his wife, Carol Rogers, to live in Delft and work on the project at IHE on behalf of UNL from October 2011 through March 2012. They were joined for one week in December 2011 by several additional UNL representatives, including Ron Yoder, Dean Eisenhauer, Gary Hergert, Marc Andreni and Prem Paul, who traveled to IHE to help further develop the collaboration.

This partnership will not only make UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education stronger by bringing a large-scale, production ag component to its curriculum, but it will build international connections and help UNL faculty make more international connections, Harvey said.

Student studies at IHE are focused solely on water in its master and doctoral programs. IHE has a strong program in hydraulics, irrigation, engineering, movement, irrigation transfer. While UNL also has these areas of expertise, IHEs experience with building international partnerships and capacity building as well as their connections across the globe will help elevate UNLs efforts to be more international in scale and scope, he said.

"We will bring our expertise and combine it with their expertise and interactions across the world," Harvey said. "Having this available to our faculty will help them a great deal."

After the first offering of the field course, the full UNL-IHE double degree program will start in October, which is when the IHE school year begins. IHE does not operate on a traditional semester system, but instead students take three-week modules of two to three daily sessions lasting two to three hours.

"So they do one class for three weeks, then move on to another class," Harvey said.

After taking eight modules of classes, students at IHE will then come to UNL each year in the spring to take a new scientific method and research methodology course that will help them to conduct their thesis research and write their thesis during the second year.

The agreement between UNESCO-IHE and UNL, signed during the 2011 Water for Food Conference in Lincoln, will not only lead to the joint Master of Science degree programs in water for food but may also offer more study abroad opportunities for Nebraska students and bidirectional faculty exchanges between UNL and IHE.

Discussions began with UNESCO-IHE following the first Water for Food conference in 2009. It was agreed that Nebraska's expertise in water and production agriculture and IHE's experience in water management focused on developing nations provide the foundation for a strong partnership.

UNESCO-IHE is the world's largest international postgraduate water education facility. Since 1957, it has provided post graduate education to more than 14,500 water professionals from more than 160 countries, the vast majority from the developing world.

Learn more about this partnership in IANR's new Growing a Healthy Future magazine.
-- Sandi Karstens