Visitors from Uganda

Today we hosted a group of academics and ECE professionals from Uganda at Seneca in Toronto. During several years a relation has been built by a student at Seneca who came to Canada from Uganda, graduated from our ECE (Early Childhood Education) program and now works at Seneca in the apprenticeship ECE program. Her mother operates a child care center in Uganda and together they made contact between a local University in Uganda and Seneca. Today both institutions signed an MOU with the intention to find funds to create meaningful academic and training cooperation.

The President of the University in Uganda spoke about their ideas of collaboration, and the President of Seneca responded in a positive and pragmatic way. Afterwards they signed the MOU.

Kilimanjaro - Amsterdam - back home

After completing our workshops in Arusha (Tanzania) last week, photos were taken from the entire group. You can see that I still "fly the Dutch colors" regularly.... :-)

On Friday Kevin and I went to the Kilimanjaro International airport from where our KLM flight would bring us back to Amsterdam. Unfortunately the starter engine for the right engine did not work at the scheduled departure time of around 10 PM. After several hours of trying to fix this the crew of KLM had to conclude a new part had to be flown in the next day from Amsterdam. So at 2 AM we were all taken off the plane and loaded in small buses (all 300 or so of us) to a local hotel where we stayed all of Saturday. This resort hotel is located at the feet of the famous Kilimanjaro mountain (see the photo above). On Saturday evening we were brought back to the airport where we waited another seven hours before the repair was done and we took off around 5 AM on Sunday morning.

We missed the connection to Toronto in Amsterdam, so KLM had to put us up for another night in a hotel. I was able to show Kevin a bit from downtown Amsterdam. On the photo above I show him where Mary and I had our (second) wedding party in Amsterdam in 1990 (after the formal wedding and party in St Thomas, Ontario).

The treat on Sunday evening was dinner in an Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam. We decided to have Kevin experience a "Rijsttafel"......

It was delicious. On Monday morning we departed for Toronto. I was home at 3 PM on Monday, more than 60 hours after we left our hotel in Arusha on Friday. A record long trip back home. But end good, all good. It is always something that can happen when traveling internationally.

Project delivery in Tanzania

This week we are delivering our second workshop on management and leadership to 25 Tanzanian college managers (see also one of my posts of July when we delivered in Morogoro). This time we are hosted in Arusha, not far from the famous Mount Kilimanjaro. The program we are delivering in is called ISTEP, so follow the arrow past the giraffe....

We have the participants work on topics such as change management, strategic planning and project management. Great bunch of people again!

The hotel training school is located right next to the training institute which services about 300 students each year in hospitality and culinary skills. At the workshop we have participants from five other colleges in the region, but the hotel school is our host these days. They have a wonderfully designed, green and well organized campus.

The photo above shows their small training restaurant which is located in the hotel. They are treating us on very nice meals here. The rooms are comfortable and they have a nice lobby bar and a lovely garden with pool area. There are certainly worse places to call your "office" for the week...

Aga Khan Foundation at Seneca

This week the 2016 Aga Khan Foundation exhibition called "Together" visited two days the Newnham campus of Seneca College in Toronto. The small exhibition shows interested visitors on how we together can further build on a better and more just world. Seneca does two international development projects with the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) in Kyrgyzstan and in Egypt. This was reason for the AKF team to stop by at Seneca with the exhibition.

The exhibition is set up in a truck which travel Canada from coast to coast with stops at community centers, schools and museums. It is an cool design on both the inside and the outside...

Seneca President David Agnew did get a short explanation and since he was the President of UNICEF Canada before he came to Seneca seven years ago, he has of course a sincere interest in this topic and he is a true supporter for the internationalization efforts at Seneca.

Outside of the truck the First Peoples Offices at Seneca had an event to celebrate indigenous learning and sharing. Good planning from our events and student services teams!

During the two days that the exhibition was at Seneca, two of the AKF staff members facilitated a two hour learning session with interested students. Good to see both sessions well attended.

The AKF can do this activity with the exhibition thanks to the financial support of the federal government of Canada through Global Affairs Canada. Thanks to the AKF team for stopping by at Seneca. It was great to have you with us. Please come again next year, OK?

Seneca King campus

Today there was a ceremony with representatives from federal, provincial and municipal government as well as some corporate partner organizations to celebrate the start of the construction of a large new building at the King campus (in King City, part of the York region north of Toronto). It will take two years to get this innovative new building completed for program offering as of September 2018.

The 26,000 students at Seneca made a significant financial contribution pledge for the building and the elected President of the SSF (Seneca Student Federation) was among the speakers, as well one of the other students who volunteers a lot his time for sports at the King campus. Impressive.

ENACTUS World Cup

ENACTUS is a worldwide organization which stimulates students at colleges and universities to think about "social entrepreneurship": for profit businesses which focus on products and services which solve social challenges. The main theme is entrepreneurship of course, but the students are stimulated to "think out of the box". Many large corporations such as KPMG and WALMART use this worldwide competition to recruit new employees.

Each year college and university teams compete regionally and then nationally. The winner of each country goes to the "World Cup". Two years ago the World Cup was hosted in Beijing, China, and I was by chance in that conference center (see my blog posts of October or November 2014). In 2015 it was hosted in Durban, South Africa, and this year the event was hosted in Toronto. I attended a lunch for college & university administrators and afterwards watched some of the competition.

There were 36 countries competing: see them listed in the photo above. On Friday (after two days of business presentations - or also called "pitches") there were 16 teams left of which the last 4 were chosen (I was not able to stay to see that).

The Canadian team (from Memorial University) was hopeful to become one of the last four...

Before that moment there were a number of presentations from ENACTUS organizers, corporate sponsors and a few former ENACTUS competitors who explained how they had made their business idea a successful reality. There was also a forum on discussions around solving the scarcity of water.

An electric atmosphere with lots of music and "hype", but again (just like in Beijing 2014) a very inspiring event to see so many engaged young professionals who want to be entrepreneurs and at the same time good corporate citizens.