Cities Alliance Annual Meeting Participants Visit ECSU
The participants of the annual meeting of `Executive committee and Consultative group ` of Cities Alliance visited Ethiopian Civil Service University`s Institute of Urban Development Studies on November 7, 2014. The forum members, drawn from more than 40 countries that include senior government officials, international organizations representatives visited the Kotebe campus of the University. In the occasion Ato Demeke Haile, Director of IUDS, Dr. Firew Mengistu, Deputy Director of the Masters Programs and Ato Solomon Tesfay, Deputy Director of the Bachelor program have briefed the visiting group about the Institutes activities.
Ato Demeke said there are more than 85 staff with the rank of lecturer, assistant professor and professor and some eight of them are international staff. He also said that there are four under graduate and six post graduate programs run in the Institute. According to Demeke so far more than 3500 students graduated from the Institute.
Anna Claudio came form Brazil. She represents Cities Alliance. She believes that such kinds of forums serve as a Knowledge dissemination or transfer of knowledge between countries and between different contexts and backgrounds. Our institution is very small but global. We have project all over the world. Our role is facilitating knowledge from other areas to Ethiopia and from Ethiopia to other areas. Our main mission is to promote equitable cities.
Fredrico Silva is From Italy. Asked about his impression of the country he said I have never been here before. I found the country very nice, very vibrant in terms of the life and the economic activity. We visited very nice projects this morning. We saw the giant infrastructure projects like the light railway system and others, which is very difficult to see in this scale in any other countries in Africa. Both Fredric and Anna believe that the cooperation between their organizations and ECSU will be Blossom in the future.
The group finally visited different laboratories and student projects.