The visit was made in connection with a week-long stay in Denmark. Dr. Bhandari is in charge of the different collaboration programmes and MoUs that TU has with foreign universities, including several Danish universities, especially Aarhus, Aalborg and Roskilde.
In Lund Bhandari and Sharma met with Elisabeth Axell, Regional Coordinator for South and Central Asia at the Division for External Relations, Strategic Partnerships and Networks, Lund University, and SASNET deputy director Lars Eklund, both old acquaintences of Bhandari, who was involved in the 2012 Erasmus Mundus Action 2 Asia Regional mobility programme EMEA coordinated by Lund University (with TU being a partner university). More information about EMEA and other South Asia related Erasmus Mundus Action 2 programmes.
Lars also met Bhandari during an official SASNET visit to Tribhuvan University in 2012. Read more about the Kathmandu visit.
While at Lund Univerity, a meeting was also held with Associate senior lecturer Henrik Davidsson at the Department of Architecture and the Built Environment, discussing a Capacity Building project involving Tribhuvan University.
The current Danish-Nepalese collaboration projects are both partly funded by the Danish development assistance agency Danida. One project, MAGART, involves besides three Danish universities and Tribhuvan also one university in Kenya and one in Uganda.
A second project is The Platform for Stability, Democracy & Rights (PSDR). It has as its goal to strengthen human and institutional capacity in partner universities in line with the overall objectives of the Building Stronger Universities (BSU) initiative, and with a specific focus on academic focus areas that can feed into three of the priorities identified in the newly revised strategy for Denmark’s development cooperation, namely: 1) Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights; 2) Gender Equality; and 3) Stability and Fragility.
In Nepal, the Platform has identified three units as initial entry points for collaboration, namely the multi-disciplinary research institute Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) at TU, and two constituent campuses located in the Western Development Region, namely the small Gorkha Campus and the larger Prithvi Narayan Campus, Pokhara. More informtation about the project.