Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU) is a public multidisciplinary university founded in 1918. The first Academy in Åbo was founded in 1640. At present the Swedish-language ÅAU has 4 faculties: Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology, Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies and Faculty of Social Sciences, Business and Economics, and Faculty of Science and Engineering. ÅAU offers both undergraduate and graduate studies and extensive research opportunities to some 7000 students on three campuses.

It has a total of 1300 employees, 700 working in education and research. About 1000 international students from more than 80 countries study at AÅU and about 200 ÅAU-students study abroad in different exchange programmes annually. ÅAU offers 9 international masters programmes taught in English: Biomedical Imaging; Chemical Engineering; Computer Science, Digital and Mobile Business (Economics and Business Administration), Embedded Computing; Information and Knowledge Management (Economics and Business Administration); International Human Rights Law; Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research and Software Engineering. ÅAU is responsible for all teacher training provided in Swedish in Finland.

Of the University’s 950 doctoral students, around 100 participate in the national doctoral programmes financed by the Academy of Finland. The doctoral programmes in Informational and Structural Biology, Chemical Engineering, Materials Research, Human Rights Research, Stochastics and theTurku Centre for Computer Science (TUCS) are led by ÅAU. In addition, the University coordinates a doctoral programme in pedagogics.

The Centre for Lifelong Learning, an independent institution at ÅAU, arranges Open University education, lecture series, continuation courses and entrepreneurship courses, as well as initiating and participating in regional and international development projects. Further focus is on learning and leadership, culture and internationalisation, entrepreneurship and organisational development, language and environmental and sustainability issues. With more than 3000 attendees each year, the Open University education provides adults with an opportunity to pursue higher education studies outside the university. The Centre for Lifelong Learning does extensive pedagogical development work and strives to develop appropriate learning environments which support goal-oriented studies and active learning.
The Centre for Lifelong Learning has functioned as the Finnish national Centre for the Baltic University Programme (BUP) since 1991. BUP is a network of about 225 universities and other institutes of higher learning in 14 countries belonging to the Baltic Sea drainage area. The programme focuses on questions of sustainable development, environmental protection, and democracy in the Baltic Sea region, finding ways of interaction among universities and between universities and society to have strong local and international educational communities.

Role of ÅAU in the project:

• Assist in the development of an online platform of resources as well as get familiarised and review the online tool.
• Contribute to the bi-annual newsletters.
• Translate project materials into the national language.
• Provide feedback to the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) framework.
• Contribute to the dissemination and exploitation of the project outputs, outcomes and future network activities.
• Participate and actively contribute to the discussions generated in regional and annual meetings, seminars and conference.

Operational and financial management:

• The project team will coordinate the above administrative and academic project activities.
• Financial administration will be handled by the project team who will liaise internally with the institution’s finance department.