Knowledge Exchange in Aquatic Animals Medicine and Ecosystem Health in the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Regions

ongoing

"The proposed project (AquaVET) ""Knowledge Exchange in Aquatic Animals Medicine and Ecosystem Health in the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan regions"" aims to mind the gap between aquaculture and veterinary medicine in both Egypt and Nigeria, by providing the first interdisciplinary master’s degree in ""Aquatic Animals Medicine and Ecosystem Health” (AQAMEH) in both Egypt and Nigeria, as a response to the challenges of both Egypt’s and Nigeria’s aquaculture industry sector. One of most important challenges that both Egypt’s and Nigeria’s aquaculture sector face, is the aquatic animals’ disease outbreaks because of extensive exposure to many agricultural and industrial pollutants and the spread of different pathogens causing high fish mortality rate that leads to economical loss in the fish farms and hatcheries. To support the government and private sector approach to address those challenges specially diseases outbreaks, scientific community in both Egypt and Nigeria should play its role by conducting more research in the field of aquatic animals' diseases. The project assembles an international team able to fix this gap and provide highly qualified specialists in aquatic animal's medicine and ecosystem health to work in the national/international labor market. Therefore, our project's main doctrine is based on enhancing the higher education in both Egypt and Nigeria (the direct output of the project) by establishing the interdisciplinary AQAMEH MSc program, therefore it will graduate a highly educated specialists with high competence skills which will increase the output of the scientific research and also will increase their employability chances which also will have a direct effect on the graduates as income and on the employers (indirect effect) by increasing the efficiency of their institutions, finally it will have a positive effect on both countries stability and so their regions."