We are happy to inform you that the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) has now granted the funds for our cooperation project with 12 universities -- including two Chinese partners who are not members of the UNCTAD Virtual Institute network.

For the time being, the funds have been only allocated for this year, but we hope that funding will be extended for up to four more years (upon our application due this autumn) .

Addis Ababa University (AAU) of Ethiopia has joined the Virtual Institute as its 31st core member and fifth university from a Least Developed Country, along with Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda and Tanzania.

AAU, the eight African university member, will participate in the programme through two of its faculties, namely the Faculty of Business and Economics (FBE) and the Faculty of Law. These faculties represent the country’s only providers of graduate education in their respective fields of study.

Vi partner, the World Trade Organization, conducted a workshop on negotiations and trade policy August 5-6 for Senegalese Vi member, Cheikh Anta Diop University's Centre de Recherches Economiques Appliquées (CREA).

"The Vi team spared no effort to make the workshop a reality," writes Ibrahima Thione Diop, the university's Vi member coordinator. "The team put us in touch with the WTO and facilitated discussions with the seminar's presenters during the recent Vi meeting held in Geneva. The Vi was the interface between CREA and the WTO, which permitted the positive results achieved today."

The Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam (DAV), a recently established institution carrying out research in international relations and foreign policy, has become the Vi's 19th affiliate member and the sixth university in Asia to join the network.

DAV's application, seconded by core Vietnamese university member, the Foreign Trade University (FTU), expresses an interest in cooperating within the network on course development, human resource capacity building, hosting events, students exchange and dual degree programmes.

Virtual Institute members from Cambodia, Colombia and Uruguay recently completed the nine-month Master of Laws in International Economic Law and Policy (IELPO) programme offered by Spanish member university, Universitat de Barcelona.

As they prepare their final research papers, due in October, Vutha Hing, Research Associate at the Cambodian Development Resource Institute, and Laura da Costa Ferré, Economist at Uruguay's Universidad de la República, share their experience.