410 AMID Young professional trainees and around 172 AMID Masterclass participants… That is the number of students that I got to know in the past 10 years working for Advanced Master in International Development (AMID) of Radboud University. All of them are dedicated to playing their part in tackling global challenges. What a true joy it has been to play a small part in each of these great people’s lives. Now it is time for me to hand over the stick of AMID program director to someone else; it’s time for new leadership.
Looking back at how the AMID Young professional program transformed over the past 10 years, I am truly proud of what we achieved with our great team. From a rather Dutch-oriented program, over the past 5 years we reshaped it into the online, international education program it is today, reaching students and their organisations across many different countries.
We could only achieve this because of the unconditional trust given to us by the team of the Institute of Development Studies of the University of Nairobi.
The first alumni meetup in Kenya earlier this year reflected the results of our efforts and gave me goosebumps. In the meantime, over the years we also broadened our educational offer to more seasoned professionals with our Masterclass (Willem Elbers) and Leadership (Dirk-Jan Koch) programs.
AMID was always considered a bit of an odd one out in the landscape of higher education (‘Is it academic enough?’, ‘Why don’t you bring ‘African’ students to the Netherlands’?). Recently, we increasingly become recognized for the different part we play in the diverse landscape of higher education. By winning the Internationalisation award of Radboud University in 2022 and by being accredited by NVAO in 2023, established institutes told us: “ok, you go about things a bit differently than we are used to, but we recognize the relevance of your role and value the quality of your work”. That is to me, in addition the playing a part in the professional life of all those students, maybe to most significant impact of AMID: contributing to shaking up how we tend to do things in higher education. Especially in current times, with significant budget cuts and policy reforms in higher education and development cooperation, I feel we need to significantly rethink how we go about (internationalisation of) higher education in general and education in the field of international development particular. For the future, I wish for AMID to continue playing its part in both areas. Keep an eye on the vacancy for my successor if you want to play your part in this!
Many thanks to all the people that made my AMID adventure (which actually started in 2007, when I was one of the trainees, see below :)) happen: students and their organisations joining us, lecturers, the advisory board, private funders that contributed to the internationalisation of AMID and foremost my wonderful (former) team members (see comments) that make saying goodbye anything but easy.
