CNRD

Since uncontrolled consumption of natural resources causes several development problems, ensuring environmental sustainability was adopted in the list of Millennium Development Goals, or MDG 7. The Center for Natural Resources and Development (CNRD) is concentrating on water management, land use, biodiversity, renewable energy sources, and regional management to help achieve this goal.

Cologne’s cooperation partners are Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Brazil, Chile, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Mexico, Mozambique, Nepal, and Vietnam as well as international organizations and further institutions involved in development cooperation.

In order to promote knowledge transfer, chairs in natural resources management will be created, Master's programs in nine partner countries networked, postgraduate programs set up, and dialogue between HEIs and stakeholders in situ supported. All research results and teaching material of the center will be made available to the public. A communication platform on the internet will be set up for this purpose.

exceed

The program “exceed - Higher Education Excellence in Development Cooperation” aims at supporting German HEIs together with their partners in developing countries . Support is given to those institutions that contribute to the realization of the Millennium Development Goals and other goals of development cooperation policy in an innovative manner. The aim is to strengthen the HEIs in the domains of education, research and consultancy. The major concerns of the program are:

• to bind together German Higher Education Institutions with priorities directly linked to the MDGs in competence centers;
• to increase education and research on issues relevant to development cooperation policy in German and partner country German Higher Education Institutions;
• raising the public profile of the universities and their MDG-related activities both at home and in the developing world to the MDGs in the eyes of the general public in Germany and developing countries;
• to establish excellent and high level research on development cooperation policy issues, so that this can serve as a guiding light and so attract international academic interest;
• to strengthen and expand north-south as well as south-south networks;
• to increase policy analysis and debate in developing countries and Germany.

By these activities, researchers and institutes are encouraged to continue and expand their commitment in development cooperation. The competence centers are meant to become think tanks for development cooperation that develop approaches for the solution of global challenges and transfer them to policy makers, donors and practitioners.
The competences centers were selected in a two-step process by an international peer-review group between October 2008 and June 2009. Five centers receive funding since July 2009 for a period of five years. The program is managed by the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst / DAAD) with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).