The Centro Regional de Cooperación en Educación Superior CRECES (Regional Center for Cooperation in Higher Education) officially launched the CRECES nucleus in El Salvador together with the Universidad Francisco Gavidia (UFG), Universidad Gerardo Barrios (UGB), Universidad Don Bosco (UDB) and Universidad Pedaóica. The objective of this nucleus is “to establish common spaces for discussion, exchange, dialogue and generation of interdisciplinary knowledge to contribute to overcoming social conflicts”, according to the Prensa Gráfica journal of El Salvador.

The director of the UFG Quality Management, Roberto Castellón Murcia; the rector of the Universidad Gerardo Barrios (UGB), José Salvador Alvarenga Rivera; the general secretary of the Universidad Don Bosco University (UDB), Xiomara Martínez and the director of Human Talent of the Universidad Pedagógica de El Salvador, Jorge Emilio Aragón, were present at the official ceremony. “The lines of work between CRECES and the universities of El Salvador will focus on the development of joint projects with national and international allies, the search for international cooperation funds, on the leadership of issues related to the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals ( SDG), and on the digital university, and will work to incorporate more Salvadoran higher education institutions to the regional organization”, said the UFG director about this new agreement.

Daniel Michaels, coordinator of CRECES, explained the meaning of this new alliance: “With this new agreement, university cooperation is strengthened to carry out a common project initiated by four universities in El Salvador and which will surely continue to add other higher education institutions from that country”.

El Salvador thus joins the pre-existing centers of CRECES, established at the Universidad Municipal Sao Caetano do Sul, in Brazil; the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (UTPL) and the Instituto Latinoamericano y del Caribe para la Calidad en ESaD-CALED (American and Caribbean Institute for Quality at ESaD-CALED, in Ecuador; the Universidad Simón Bolívar of Barranquilla, in Colombia; the Asociación de Universidades del Caribe-UNICA (Association of Caribbean Universities); the Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, in Peru and the International Association CONEXX Europe, in Belgium.

CRECES was created in August 2017 by the Asociación Colombiana de Universidades-ASCUN (Colombian Association of Universities) under the auspices of the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (IESALC), in order to join efforts aimed at strengthening cooperation between the Higher education systems and their institutions, as well as to innovate in the mechanisms and devices of collaborative work that positively impact the quality of HE in the region.