The DAAD uses funds from the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to promote higher education partnerships in areas that are relevant to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) - also in the area of 'Biodiversity and Ecosystem Restoration' (in a separate funding line) - that contribute to sustainable development in line with the SDGs and to establishing high-performing cosmopolitan higher education institutions in the partner countries and in Germany. Planning provides for teaching, research and higher education management at the partner institutions to be structurally improved in the context of funding.

Background

The increase and intensification of global challenges, in particular in view of the future, give rise to greater demand for a concentration of resources, promotion of system efficiency, inter-disciplinary cooperation and broad-scale use of tried-and-tested education and collaboration models. 

Reaching the SDGs is an urgent objective that is relevant to all of humankind, and global cooperation is the only way to move closer to this goal. This is why the ‘SDG Partnerships’ programme focuses on the challenges listed above, and is designed to contribute to sustainable development and therefore to reaching the SDGs.
Higher education institutions play a key role in this context. The programme was initiated by the DAAD to enable German higher education institutions and their partner institutions in developing or emerging countries to address topics that are relevant to the SDGs.

Programme objectives

The programme’s short and medium-term goals are to structurally improve teaching, research and higher education management at the partner institutions, to stabilise existing cooperation structures among the higher education institutions involved, and to establish new structures in a sustainable manner.

In the long term, the SDG Partnerships aim to contribute to a sustainable development and establishment of high-performing cosmopolitan higher education institutions in the partner countries and in Germany. In addition, German higher education institutions should obtain expertise in development cooperation, and discipline-specific networks that are relevant to development are to be set up among the higher education institutions and other facilities involved.

These effects should be pursued across all areas that are relevant to the SDGs. Individual focus areas will be granted special attention and preferential funding in line with the situation at the time. In the first call for applications, this applied for the area of ‘One Health’.

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