Prof. Dr. Axel Freimuth – Rector, University of Cologne

Tying the knot between University of Cologne and the University of Dschang

Cologne, UoC – 08/09/2017. At the end of the working visit of the delegation from the University of Dschang, from 4^th  to 8^th  September 2017, at the University of Cologne in Germany, Prof. Dr. Axel Freimuth evaluates the work done and projects the future.

Thank you, sir, for welcoming us here in the University of Cologne. What are your appreciations of this working visit?

The University of Cologne is very proud to have welcomed this delegation. We have the summer school going on with the students from the University of Dschang. We have realized that there are many common research and teaching interests for future cooperation. So, this has been a very great visit with enormous results. We are anxiously looking forward to our future cooperation.

What do you expect from the University of Dschang?

We discussed on one hand on how we could work on very important topics, and I am very glad that some of the profiled areas of our university are similar to the research interest of our partner university. So, with some concrete examples at hand, we are going to cooperate in the fields of food security, health economics, clinical studies and so on. As important as is the cooperation in the area of teaching, so is the student exchange program. We have discussed joint programs between the two Universities for very concrete results.

What are the steps forward?

The immediate step forward is to start the concrete cooperation in the areas I have just mentioned. We have also agreed that some researchers will be invited to attend the conference on food security at the University of Cologne next year. I think, there is also a plan to have more exchanges, in order to discuss details on the next step in the areas we have identified for emphasis. We have envisaged a visit next year to evaluate the ongoing concrete areas of cooperation and examine steps to ameliorate them. We mutually agreed that the collaboration between our University and your University is very important; not only for the two universities but for the development of international relations and the development of relations between European universities and African universities./