Some Humber faculty will be heading to Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom nestled between India and China, as the college is set to launch its biggest international project yet.
Nalini Andrade, the manager of the International Development Institute at Lakeshore, said the project is called The Bhutan Education and Skills Training (BEST) and is funded by the Canadian government.
The scale of the five-year initiative is bigger than past projects, with a budget of $4.95 million.
“This is the largest development funding Humber has been working with and one of the biggest fundings Canada has given to Bhutan in the past couple of years,” Andrade said.
She says such a major project wasn’t a complete surprise. Bhutan officially requested Canada’s support in education on a post-secondary level and since the two countries have a long history of diplomatic and educational relationships, the BEST initiative was just a logical continuation of these international ties.
“Canada has a long history outside of Humber of supporting the Bhutanese education system, that’s why it was open to such big collaboration,” Andrade said.
Humber also wasn’t chosen randomly. It was the only post-secondary Canadian institution with previous experience working with Bhutan, making it a suitable candidate for the project.
Unlike previous smaller initiatives, which focused on promoting Humber, this one will include directly helping Bhutan to reform its education system and assist students in their job search.
Ana Garcia, an International Development practitioner from Humber and BEST project’s lead, said some of the college’s staff will travel to Bhutan this month to work with local teachers to help develop the school curriculum, including preparing learning materials and rubrics and implement new classes in their educational program.
“Under the project, a few different courses will be developed, including solar, photovoltaic, electrical engineering and graphic design,” Garcia said.
Apart from that, Humber is going to help Bhutan develop career counselling for students, including how to create business plans and how to be an entrepreneur.
“We are going to help them create industry responsive courses that will allow youth in Bhutan to have a high-quality education and then go into employment,” Garcia said.