Latin America and the Caribbean consultation addressed main themes of the #WHEC2022

UNESCO’s third World Higher Education Conference (WHEC2022), to be held in Barcelona, Spain, from May 18-20, 2022, will mark the roadmap to be followed in the coming decades to make higher education more inclusive, diverse, innovative, of quality and responsive to today’s development requirements.

Under the slogan “Reinventing Higher Education for a Sustainable Future”, the hybrid event -online and face-to-face- seeks to contribute to the improvement of higher education organizations and systems focused on Human Rights, attending to the Sustainable Development Goals established in the 2030 agenda and with the firm aspiration of leaving no one behind.

The ten main themes of the conference are: the impact of COVID-19 on higher education, higher education and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), inclusion, program quality and relevance, academic mobility, governance, financing, data and knowledge production, international cooperation and the futures of higher education.

In this context, the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC) initiated a broad consultation process specific to Latin America and the Caribbean, which gathered the voices of different stakeholders related to higher education on the key themes of the conference.

The idea of this open consultation was to capture the richness provided by the different perspectives, as well as to generate debates and proposals within the various spheres in order to elevate them and enrich the #WHEC2022 discussions.

Together with the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB), the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and Santander Universities, webinars were developed, whose themes revolved around the ten main areas.

Each of these webinars featured a presentation on a subject matter by an expert and panels with representatives from the government sector and key stakeholders in higher education. Review the key ideas, presentations and recordings in the following links:

Webinar 1: Inclusion in higher education

Webinar 2: Preparing for the futures of higher education

Webinar 3: Higher education governance

Webinar 4: Program quality and relevance

Webinar 5: Financing higher education

Webinar 6: International cooperation to improve synergies

Webinar 7: Academic mobility in higher education

Webinar 8: Data and knowledge production

Webinar 9: Higher education and the SDGs

Webinar 10: Impact of COVID-19 on higher education

Closing Webinar: Closing panel