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Southeast Asian Universities Network Project to Realize Green Entrepreneurship and Leadership

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ASEAN Network for Green Entrepreneurship and Leadership (ANGEL) is a Higher Education Institution Capacity Building project called Erasmus+ Capacity Building for Higher Education (CBHE) which is fully sponsored by the European Union. This international collaboration is a networking project among Southeast Asian countries to implement and realize green entrepreneurship and leadership. It consists of 12 institutions from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and four institutions from the European Union (EU). The Southeast Asian countries involved are Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Lao PDR. These Southeast Asian universities are supported by partners universities and institutions from Greece and Cyprus.

            Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) is honoured to be part of this project with the total funds given is RM238,084 out of RM4,591,096 for the total grant. The project is being led by a team of researchers from Faculty of Technology and Business Management (FPTP) and the project leader is Dr. Siti Sarah Omar, and another six project members are Prof. Dr. Shahir Shamsir Omar, Prof. Dr. Wan Fauziah Wan Yusoff, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Abd Rahman Ahmad, Dr. Umi Kartini Rashid, Dr. Noor Aslinda Abu Seman, and Dr. Dahlia Fernandez Mohd Farid Fernandez. The project commenced on 15 January 2021 until 14 January 2024 with a total duration of 3 years.

            ANGEL aims to build the capacity necessary in these ASEAN Universities for balancing the high potential economic growth and innovation. The project goal is to help improve their capabilities in the field of green entrepreneurship as well as resolving entrenched issues and challenges of poverty, low-quality jobs in the informal sector, digital divide, and leadership gaps.

            Within the context of Southeast Asian institutions, the green entrepreneurial mindset and transformational leadership skills and competencies are still new concepts and less implemented. Hence, the mission of ANGEL is to engender impact and transformation for two major target stakeholders of each partner institution in Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Lao PDR. The first target group is the internal stakeholders namely students, academic and non-academic staff, and top management. The second target group of ANGEL is the disadvantaged group among societies in the Southeast Asian countries involved. This includes women and minorities, poor income groups in both urban and rural communities as well as people with disabilities (PWD).

            Against the above general aims of ANGEL, the project specifically designs the following objectives in the hope to develop an innovative green entrepreneurial-leadership ecosystem that will foster:

  • Guidance: an online guide will offer practical, personalized information for building and leading a green enterprise; a targeted training programme, complemented with personal coaching will support the creation of start-ups.
  • Engagement: a university network will reach and mobilize both internal and external stakeholders through its ANGEL-Innovate Unit. Internal stakeholders would include faculty members, administrative staff, researchers, students and relevant external partners could be social entrepreneurs, start-ups and government agencies that relate to green entrepreneurship.
  • Exchanges and Sharing: the ANGEL-Hub will be a centre for the development of early-stage start-ups in green technologies, energy and sustainable development.
  • Support: the ANGEL-Enterprise team will have the mission to support and advance ANGEL in the long term through the development of expertise in the commercialization of Universities’ knowledge and technology, and partnership-building with the external regional/national/international entrepreneurial ecosystem.

            For more information about this project, please visit ANGEL’s official website at https://angel-project.eu/ and the facebook page at facebook.com/angel.EUASEAN.

Written by: Dr. Dahlia Fernandez