Introduction
REACH is an Erasmus funded project with (ref.609976-EPP-1-2019-1-PS-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP) under the action of capacity building in the field of Higher Education 2019. Five Palestinian universities and five EU universities, in addition to industry representatives are participating in REACH. The project period starts from November 2019 until November 2022.
Overall Aim:
REACH project aims at enhancing the capacities of Palestinian HEIs in promoting cross border employability of students and graduates through an effective and constructive cooperation between Palestinian and European Universities. Increasing administrators and academics’ skills will allow students/graduates to develop their potential and actively participate in reducing youth unemployment in Palestine.
This aim will be reached through the following actions:
- Building the knowledge and skills of the administrators from the Palestinian HEIs will enable them to contribute with the European partners in upgrading the career centers’ services in their universities. From this training component, it is expected that REACH partners will identify good practice, learn more about how EU universities undertake career centers’ activities, Including cross border work units’ activities, and innovate strategies to promote similar actions in their own universities.
- Building the capabilities of Palestinian university specialists, and enabling them to work with the European partners in the design and preparation of the training modules for graduate students, will also result in the transfer of capabilities to the Palestinian graduates to expand their opportunity for cross border employment.
- PHEI capacities will be developed in terms of infrastructure (mainly computer equipment), planning and performance for better institutional management of cross border employability. This will be achieved through cross border work offices benefiting from the training modules conducted by the EU partners. These offices will actively promote the culture of cross border work inside and outside the Palestinian universities as an effective strategy to reduce unemployment among graduates.
This project intends to achieve the following three specific objectives:
- Enhancing the competence and performance of career centres/alumni Units at PHEIs in creating and promoting cross border work employment;
- Strengthening graduates’ skills and know-how required for obtaining cross border employment in six fields: Foreign language teaching (FLT), translation, web design, mechanical design (primarily CAD), robots and machines programming and graphic design.
- Reinforcing PHEIs links with local and international labour markets focusing on cross border work.
