On 26 August in the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca, Carlos Pastor, Rector of ISTEPS, and Yon Arruti, a MUNDUKIDE cooperant, signed an agreement to establish inter-institutional collaboration mechanisms between the parties with regard to common goals and objectives for the strengthening of popular and solidarity economy organisations in Ecuador.
The mission of the ISTEPS Institute is to train professional technologists who contribute to strengthening the actors of the popular and solidarity economy of the country, with a critical, creative, innovative and ethical sense, who develop scientific and technological knowledge with social responsibility and civic commitment aligned with the principles of the Popular and Solidarity Economy, and among its institutional strategies is to contribute to guarantee the right to higher education at the technological level through teaching, research and links with society, ensuring increasing levels of quality, innovation, academic excellence and relevance; promote the creation, development, transmission and dissemination of science, technique, technology with specific competences and capacities for the strengthening of HPS organisations, labour insertion and employment generation; direct its academic activity towards a holistic, integral and integrating training focused on the development of organisations, their products, services and processes of the popular economy and popular and solidarity finance, with a high practical content; to make the articulation, association, cooperation and integration of the actors and sectors of the EPS viable, encouraging the application of the principles and values of cooperativism and of the social and solidarity economic system that strengthens their organisations and the wellbeing of the communities.
The purpose of this Framework Agreement is to generate an academic platform for inter-institutional collaboration that allows the implementation of coordination, interaction, cooperation and reciprocity mechanisms between both parties, promoting the implementation of activities of mutual interest and benefit. This has the purpose of promoting the application of methodologies and approaches that promote a better articulation of the actors of the popular and solidarity economy to training programmes, technical training for social strengthening and access to markets. In turn, this objective aims to strengthen the capacities of both institutions through the exchange of information and knowledge.
Ecuador
