Fast-Track your Impact with the Short Initiative (SI) Programme
Short Initiative (SI) projects are short-term, impactful projects designed to explore, build, and deepen academic and scientific collaborations. These projects are ideal for academics new to the VLIRUOS community, as well as experienced promoters looking to explore new partnerships or valorise existing ones. With a focus on addressing urgent sustainable development challenges, SI projects deliver tangible results within two years.
Key Highlights
• Duration: Up to 2 years
• Budget: €70,000 to fuel your innovative ideas
• Eligible Partner Countries: Benin, Bolivia, Burundi, Cuba, DR Congo, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam
• Focus: Academic capacity building through education, research, and/or Higher Education management, with an emphasis on societal impact. SI projects offer differentiated aims, allowing for exploration, innovation, or valorisation of partnerships. Due to their short-term nature, these projects often have a more applied focus, ensuring immediate and practical outcomes after the project duration.
• Who: SI projects are exclusively for teams of academics from at least two partner institutions—one in Belgium and one in an eligible partner country.
Why SI Projects Matter
SI Projects are designed to rapidly address real-world challenges, producing direct and measurable results within two years. They are ideal for both the exploration of new partnerships and the valorisation or continuation of existing ones, with the main goal of achieving tangible outcomes that have a societal impact. By focusing on concrete problems or themes, SI projects ensure quick, targeted solutions that contribute directly to sustainable development goals.
By fostering partnerships between academia, civil society, the private sector, and public institutions, SI projects co-create knowledge and solutions that generate societal impact. They also serve as stepping stones for future collaborations, often evolving into long-term partnerships that build on their success.
Good Practice
Community Talks (April 2021) | Digital Midwifery Workplace in Rwanda
In April 2021, the University of Rwanda (UoR) and the Artevelde University of Applied sciences & arts presented their SI project during a Community Talk.
This project aimed to contribute the government plans to increase capacity by improving the quality of midwifery clinical education. The project team conducted two qualitative studies to explore if the competency-based continuous workplace learning model (Embo et al., 2015) and the e-portfolio (Medbook) were feasible for clinical education in Rwanda.