On December 10, 2025, the Board of Directors of the Faculty of Education at Unicamp received a delegation from Angola for a working meeting focused on building academic and institutional partnerships. Participants included Maria Antónia Custódio Ñgalayessanda, senior official from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (representing the Secretary of State Eugênio da Silva), Jorge Manuel de Sousa Chaves, head of the Department of Scientific Research and Postgraduate Studies, and Helder Pedro Alicerces Bahu, president of the Higher Institute of Educational Sciences (ISCED) of Huíla province.
The visit took place in the context of the 9th Meeting of Research Groups on Children and Childhoods – GRUPECI, under the responsibility of Professor Gabriela Tebet, and reinforced an already strategic axis for FE-Unicamp: to expand international dialogues around teacher training, research in education and, especially, contemporary agendas on childhood and early childhood education.
Representing the Angolan Ministry, Maria Antónia highlighted that the body is responsible for coordinating with public and private higher education institutions and emphasized the interest in strengthening projects related to early childhood education and teacher training. She also mentioned the implementation of a decree focused on initial teacher training (from primary to secondary education), stressing the importance of monitoring, in practice, the results of the training cycle foreseen in the legislation.
During the meeting, the FE-Unicamp Board presented aspects of the infrastructure and possibilities for academic cooperation with international partners, including the potential for hybrid and remote activities, such as seminars, shared courses, and research meetings via videoconference, a resource that has been used to bring teams closer together in different time zones.
The conversation also placed the visit within the recent history of the Faculty's internationalization. Throughout 2025, FE-Unicamp coordinated and monitored the signing of the Cooperation Agreement between Unicamp and the Pedagogical University of Maputo (Mozambique), formalized on February 19th at the Executive Directorate of International Relations (DERI), with the presence of the director of FE-Unicamp, Debora Jeffrey.
During the meeting with the Angolan delegation, the Board also detailed an important aspect of the “Unicamp way” of structuring cooperation: the proposal for a broader agreement, understood as an institutional “umbrella,” from which supplementary plans and specific projects are built, allowing different areas and units of the University to be involved as academic interests are consolidated.
In conclusion, it was agreed that FE-Unicamp will share models and procedures for formalizing agreements with the delegation, with a view to transforming the initial dialogue into an effective work plan. The meeting reaffirms the institutional policy of the Faculty of Education at Unicamp to expand international collaboration networks and, at the same time, to support these partnerships in concrete agendas—research, training, and knowledge production—around common challenges, such as teacher training and guaranteeing children's rights from their earliest years.
