After establishing our position as a central actor in the quality assurance and evaluation of European higher education, we were offered the chance to run European Commission funded development projects in European Neighbourhood Policy countries. We won two Twinning project tenders: one to develop higher education in Armenia in accordance with the Bologna Process and the other to bring higher education in Azerbaijan closer to the European Higher Education Area.

A special feature of the Twinning projects is that throughout the entire time that the projects run, the experts from the country leading the project live in the recipient country. At this moment, my long-term colleague Kalle Holm is living in Yerevan, Armenia and Reijo Aholainen, from the Ministry of Education and Culture, moved to Baku, Azerbaijan at the beginning of September. Both projects run for two years. My role in the projects is to be Project Leader and visit the recipient country four times a year to hold a steering-group meeting. In addition, I visit both countries in my role as an expert, as do numerous other Finnish specialists. Our junior partner in Armenia is Germany, and in Azerbaijan it is Estonia.

Work in the target country means stepping out of the comfort zone, and it also challenges you to improve your interaction. It has also allowed me to get to know Transcaucasia’s culture, politics and history: the Armenian Genocide, the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the history of Oil extraction and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, where I gained perspectives on the conflict from both sides.