The Secretary-General of the Organization of Southern Cooperation (OSC), Sheikh Manssour Bin Mussallam, today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Minister of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology of the Republic of The Gambia, Professor Pierre GOMEZ, at the OSC Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The Memorandum of Understanding aims to establish a leading Regional Transdisciplinary Research Institute of the OSC in Gambia to reinforce South-South cooperation through knowledge production, sharing, translation, and transmission.

This OSC Regional Transdisciplinary Research Institute will contribute to advancing balanced and inclusive education systems that address and respond to contextualized needs of communities and societies, and thus participate in the overall mandate of the Organization of Southern Cooperation (OSC) in the specific areas pertaining to building Balanced and Inclusive Education systems, reinforcing transdisciplinary research and production capacities, and developing endogenous technologies.

Furthermore, the objectives of the Regional Transdisciplinary Research Institute notably include the promotion of academic mobility in the region through the OSC’s Framework to Reinforce Exchanges between Youth and Regions through Education (FREYRE) Program; the capacity-building of local researchers, decision makers, practitioners, local communities and civil society leaders in transdisciplinary research, practice, and policymaking; and the promotion of knowledge production and dissemination from and in any of the Global South languages besides four official languages of OSC.

As part of the Memorandum signed today, the OSC is committed to provide policy advice, technical support, coordination, and partnership-building to this first regional institute.

The OSC Regional Transdisciplinary Research Institute to open in Banjul, Gambia is part of the outcomes of the General Assembly of the organization held in 2021 in Geneva, Switzerland during which the Secretary-General of the OSC was mandated to establish two contextually relevant Regional Transdisciplinary Research Institutes.

The Organization of Southern Cooperation (OSC) was established on 29 January 2020 by countries and organizations from across the Global South at the International Summit on Balanced and Inclusive Education held in the Republic of Djibouti. As the first intergovernmental organisation of and by the Greater South, the OSC acts as an instrument of intellectual, technical and financial cooperation and solidarity between its Member States as well as its Associate Members in the pursuit of a Third Way of Development – from the South, for Humanity.