The Creation of a regional knowledge exchange mechanism – Stimulation of regional cooperation among parliamentarians, Academia, and productive sector representatives – Mobility Facilitation for professors and students in the Mediterranean region – the setting up of a hub enabling stakeholders to draw upon top expertise for activities on specific topics – Identify stakeholders’ areas of excellence will take centre stage on the occasion of the International Conference for the establishment of the PAM Academic Platform for the Euro-Mediterranean region with the aim to facilitating interaction among National Parliaments, Universities, Research Centres and the productive sector.
The event will take place on 11-12 December 2014, in Catania, Italy, hosted by the Rector of the University of Catania, co-promoter of the PAM Academic Platform. The meeting will define the structure of the mechanism; establish first contacts; propose projects and schedule future steps of the Platform; draw up a preliminary list of participants and partners, and register their availability for future collaboration; build a working group focused on the issues of students’ mobility; set up a list of priorities for the future work-plan; delegate a focal point for each stakeholder, and simplify the communication and coordination of the project.
Stakeholders from different sectors can benefit, through the PAM Academic Panel, from each other’s expertise in a goal-oriented manner, with the purpose of providing MPs with state of the art information on key issues and, on the other hand, provide Academia and the productive sector with direct access to decision makers.
“With this platform we will be able to give further impetus to education and research in the Euro-Mediterranean area, through a series of concrete cooperation initiatives and integration processes with the productive sector, which will help to recover the competitiveness gap with the US, Japan and the emerging economies of India and China”, Catania University Rector, Prof. Giacomo Pignataro explained during the presentation of the event.
The PAM President, Sen. Francesco Amoruso on the other hand stressed the need to further increase synergies with the legislators of the region, in order to support and coordinate actions aimed at establishing long term policies for the development of the necessary conditions where aspirations can be turned into opportunities for personal growth and social stability