Stories

It is July 2013. The dry air takes my breath away. The asphalt of the treeless parking lot sticks to my feet. Our Tanzanian colleague Daniel takes us to his car for a 3-hour trip through the organized chaos of Dar es Salaam’s city traffic. He drives carefully. Mopeds pass us by, left and right on the dusty service roads.

Senegal 2015: Jeroen Aerts and Joachim Broeders, two of our UHasselt engineering master students construct a windmill to power PC’s in a local school in Warang. Batteries are used to buffer the energy when the windmill produces electricity but there is no power shortage.

Dear Daniel, about 12 years ago we started collaborating, your university in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and my university in Hasselt, Belgium. You visited us for the first time to attend a joint master thesis defense in June 2013. Since then, the number of joint research and education activities has only grown.

It’s a typical cold, grey day in Hasselt when I meet Irene, Thomas and Curthbert, MSc scholars in the VLIR-UOS IUC-project with Ardhi University (ARU) in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). Their big smile immediately brings a warm feeling into the room ...

In the Mid ‘90s, with the rise of PC’s and the early Internet, it became common within the 5 Flemish University Computer Centres, to travel to ‘the South’ to assist universities in adapting these new technologies within their local environments.

My involvement in ‘University Development Cooperation’ began thanks to a personal relationship. I freshly arrived at the LUC when Paul Steels asked me: 'For years we are trying to set up a project in Congo, without success...'