At the end of June 2023, Professor Ann Peeters, from the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, received an honorary doctorate from the Université de Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as Chair of VLIR-UOS, alongside ULB colleague Professor Serge Jaumain, who received the honour as Chair of ARES, the French-speaking equivalent of VLIR-UOS.
The award was bestowed to recognise the long-standing cooperation with colleagues from the Université de Lubumbashi and the impressive results achieved, thanks to the efforts of hundreds of academics and policy staff. “The cooperation with the Université de Lubumbashi involved over 400 PhDs, of which more than 200 were financed by VLIR-UOS and ARES,” Ann Peeters explains. “In addition, the university just recently got a VLIR-UOS Interuniversity cooperation (IUC) project approved that will run for the next ten years and will involve some €6 mln in funding. It is the first time the Université de Lubumbashi gets such a large-scale project financed by VLIR-UOS.”
Earlier this year, in March, representatives from the Université de Lubumbashi visited Brussels and VUB in the framework of the IUC project and were invited to an audience with King Philippe. It underlines the strong links and collaboration between Belgium and the DRC in the fields of education, research, capacity-building, and community-based research. The focus of the IUC project, which kicked off in September 2022, will be sustainable development in the Copperbelt area of DRC, and will involve a multitude of disciplines and focus areas, ranging from ecology, health, medicine, to IT, and will be a collaboration between the Université de Lubumbashi and the five Flemish Universities.
Professor Arno Libotton was also fêted for his work on quality assurances in higher education in DRC
In addition to the award-giving ceremony for the two Honorary Doctorates, the Université de Lubumbashi also fêted VUB’s Professor Arno Libotton for his work on quality assurances in higher education in DRC. This project, which has been running over the past 11 years as well, has spilt over from higher education into secondary schools across the DRC and even further afield. His app and guidelines document have been launched and are helping reshape the DRC’s education.
Professor Ann Peeters’ Chair of VLIR-UOS will run out at the end of August 2023, but she will remain active in the IUC project with the Université de Lubumbashi through a PhD student who is running a project looking at the multilingual elements in social entrepreneurship, where they will conduct a survey looking at language use in a trade context and look at the tools that are being set up in English, which from a global perspective, is still the main trading language. The work will be done under the joint supervision of Professor Nikolai Dentchev, Professor Ann Peeters and Professor Michaël Kasombo Tshibanda.
Professor Ann Peeters: “My year as Chair of VLIR-UOS has taught me a lot, and I gained so many interesting insights into the projects that are running. It’s been fascinating to see the ins and outs of them and observe how much cooperation there actually is with the Global South, and the impact in the South but also at Flemish universities. I was also impressed by the wide spectrum of disciplines that are working together across the universities. And yes, I’d do it again in a heartbeat!”