Secretaria de Relações Internacionais | Office of International Relations

The Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), through the Office of International Relations (SINTER), was invited to speak in the launch event of the 2021 “Brazilian Cooperation for International Development” (COBRADI) Report, together with the COBRADI Research coordinator at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) and two other federal public institutions. The event will take place on 15 December 2022, from 3 pm to 5 pm, in Brasília, DF, and will be streamed online.

The importance of this invitation is due to the fact that the three federal public institutions invited to speak at the event are those that presented the best practices in terms of international cooperation provided by Brazil in the year 2021. UFSC has stood out for the work carried out in the fields of internationalization and educational and scientific cooperation.

According to the Director of International Relations at UFSC, Fernanda Leal, “the COBRADI Research has been carried out by Ipea since 2010 and, in this edition, it has included the participation of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and the collection of data on South-South cooperation. We decided to participate in the research due to the importance of knowing and disseminating the University’s contribution to international cooperation for development. In addition, the data obtained may support our institutional internationalization policy”.

The Director also observes that “there are several methodological challenges involved in carrying out this research, mainly related to the fragmentation of internationalization data at the University. However, through the collaboration of SINTER [Office of International Relations] with the International Relations program and the support from various University units, such as PROPESQ [Prorectorate for Research and Innovation], PROEX [Prorectorate for Outreach and Extension], the Internationalization Coordination Office at PROPG [Prorectorate for Graduate Studies] and the Personnel Training Coordination Office at PRODEGESP [Prorectorate for Personnel Management and Development], we have been able to advance and design a methodology that may even guide other HEIs that decide to participate in the next editions of the research.”

Professor Iara Leite, from the International Relations program, has been coordinating the data collection methodology and involving her students in the analyses. “The participation of students is essential to promote the curricularization of outreach at our university, including by carrying out classroom activities, and it would be interesting to take this model to other International Relations programs at universities that want to collect their data.”

She also highlighted that “with the emergence of new evaluation indicators of graduate programs in Brazil, which begin to assess social impacts, we considered it important to involve the Graduate Program in International Relations too. This is happening through the outstanding participation of the master’s student Tayane Tjader Martins in the team, who is not only transforming data into information, but also developing a thesis on the subject”.

About the COBRADI reasearch

Ipea has been carrying out the COBRADI Research since 2010. Between 2005 and 2020, the information was consolidated into six different reports on the cooperation provided by Brazil, which helped the Brazilian Government in the planning of its external actions. From 2022, the research has become the official source of information on Brazil’s contributions to the progress of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in other countries. The results are also regularly shared with the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), so that the Brazilian external expenditures on SDGs can be integrated with those of other countries, as well as with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), to help measure and quantify South-South Cooperation.

For further information, visit Ipea website.

You can also watch a webinar about the participation of UFSC in the research (in Portuguese).