About GCHERA

Agricultural universities worldwide are facing numerous challenges including increasingly limited resource allocations, declining enrollments, keeping up with advances in information and other technologies, remaining aware of and responsive to stakeholders, and the need to aggressively globalize their teaching, research and outreach programs. Although the scale of the problems and the local conditions vary across and among regions, there are remarkable similarities in the fundamental nature of these challenges.

The realization that these are shared challenges, combined with a political and economic climate that lends itself to the lowering of national barriers, presents an environment conducive to global networking and cooperation among universities. However, when GCHERA was born, existing international organizations did not  have the mandate to bring together agricultural universities on a global scale to share lessons learned.

GCHERA grew out of an international conference held in 1998 in Kiev, which marked the 100 th anniversary of the National Agricultural University of Ukraine and the completion of a four-year university linkage project involving many institutions around the world and financed by the United States Information Service.

The consortium was formed as a result of shared concern for the future of the planet and a conviction that higher education in agriculture should play a leadership role in solving problems associated with food security and environmental sustainability. The consortium aims to include and serve institutions with programs in agriculture, veterinary medicine, and natural resources management, including the biological, physical and social sciences dimensions of these fields. The founders designed the organization to be helpful to institutions world wide that are working to make significant reforms in their systems of higher agricultural education.

A new Confederation

During the 2009 and 2010 Executive Committee meetings of GCHERA, it was agreed that the present organization of GCHERA should evolve towards a Confederation of Regional University Associations, with the aim to go beyond the current activity of a biennial conference and to emerge as a partner to other international organizations, such as FAO, in the development of sustainable rural economies worldwide.

The 7th GCHERA Conference that was held in Beauvais in June 2011 gave the opportunity to the representatives of the Global Regional University Associations and the GCHERA Executive Committee members to establish this new confederation during a Founding General Assembly, with direct membership of the Associations instead of the universities alone.

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