Global Citizenship & Development

The total cost is roughly equivalent to a year of higher education in your home country.

You will spend more on medical preparation and travel expenses, but you will save on accommodation and living costs during your stay in the South.

The study advisors can provide you with a more detailed description of the costs per country.

Tuition fees are charged per academic year. You can find the registration fee for this program here.

Other costs include those for your flight ticket, vaccinations, and possibly a visa (depending on the country). You also pay a monthly rent for your room with a host family. You pay this rent directly to the host families or the projects, and not to the university of applied sciences. We estimate the total cost (all-inclusive) at €4,000 - €5,500 for the full academic year.

Classes take place on the Sociale School campus (SSH, Groeneweg 151 in Heverlee) between 9:30 AM and 6:00 PM. Some classes are organized online.

Exceptionally, classes or activities are also scheduled outside these hours:

• In September: two-day trip with overnight stay
• guest speaker about your country, e.g., one evening
• 1 cultural activity with your country group, e.g., on the weekend

After returning from the South, you will still participate in the return day in May, but there will be no more classes. You then only need to come to the campus for the evaluation interview, the exams, and the defense of your bachelor's thesis.

The course starts in the course of September. We will then begin the intensive 8-week preparation program.

The course content is identical for both variants. If you follow the English-language ‘Advanced Bachelor Global Citizenship and Development’ program, you will receive an English diploma. Classes are then conducted in English as standard. In addition, there are tutorials (small-scale practice sessions) organized in Dutch. The study materials are also available in Dutch. 

You write your assignments in English, including the bachelor’s thesis. Students following the Dutch-language variant receive all classes and study materials in Dutch, and complete their assignments in Dutch. They obtain the ‘Banaba Global Citizenship and Development’ diploma.

Our student body is very diverse. Approximately half of the participants in this program hold a Bachelor's degree, while the other half have a Master's degree. By way of example: you might be in a country group together with an occupational therapist, social worker, communications scientist, bioengineer, and a secondary school teacher.

In addition, the Sri Lanka and Uganda country groups have an internationally diverse student body; alongside Flemish students, you will also find participants from other European countries, Africa, or Latin America.

You will also be in contact, particularly during the preparation phase, with the international students who will be doing their internship in Belgium or Portugal.

To ensure you integrate as well as possible into your internship environment, it is best that you do not always find yourself in exactly the same network or at the same project location as another student. Nevertheless, we always try to send you as a student to a specific region in a group, because we believe it is important that you can rely on each other if necessary. Two options are possible:

• You stay in the same village or city as one or more other students. This allows you to visit each other as needed. For example: with different internship partners, with the same partner but each at a different project of this partner, staying in each other's neighborhood, or in the same accommodation.
• You stay within a 1 or 2-hour drive of other students, giving you the opportunity to visit each other on weekends.

From the intake interview onwards, we prepare you for departure as a group. For the study program, it is important that you can interact with each other professionally and respectfully during your stay in the South. This interaction with one another is also part of the evaluation criteria for the 'Internship Abroad' course. 

The proximity to other students depends on the project and the region you choose. We discuss this in detail during the intake process and take your preferences into account as much as possible.

The program facilitates the search for a housing arrangement as much as possible. There are various housing options:

• host family
• student room (e.g., on a university campus)
• room at the project
• living together with other young people in an apartment

A combination is also possible, e.g., an initial period with a host family followed by a choice of other options.

Each of these housing options has its own characteristics. We prefer housing arrangements where you live under one roof with locals. In many of the countries where we operate, we work with host families.

Nevertheless, in some regions, this form of communal living is rare or the context is less conducive to it. Ultimately, the type of accommodation you are placed in as a student in the South depends on the possibilities within a specific country, region, or project.

You will receive more specific information regarding housing options during the second interview (orientation interview with the country coordinator).

The Bachelor's thesis is a scientifically sound research project in which you, as a student, demonstrate that you have acquired the full range of study competencies.

Method: Participatory Action Research

Within the Banaba International North-South Cooperation, we explicitly choose a participatory action research approach (Participatory Action Research – PAR).

PAR is a scientifically recognized research tradition that aligns strongly with our vision on international cooperation. PAR explicitly starts from locally defined priorities and ‘real-life problems’ and investigates these together with the local organization or community. Together with these stakeholders, a process of critical reflection and dialogue regarding the problem statement is initiated in order to gain insight and bring about change.

The success of PAR is measured not only by the quality of the information obtained, but also by the way in which the organization or community was actively involved in the research and the extent to which their knowledge, skills, and capabilities were improved. 

Bachelor's Thesis: primarily practice-oriented or knowledge-oriented

Depending on your background and the nature of the research, a bachelor's thesis can be practice-oriented or knowledge-oriented. As a student, you demonstrate that you can formulate and develop a problem statement and a research question in a methodologically sound manner, using international cooperation and development as a perspective.

It reflects:

• your reasoning skills;
• your ability to process information;
• your critical reflection;
• the competence to apply solution strategies to real-world problem situations.

In addition to using a coherent foundation based on scientific literature, you primarily gather research material, and a personal and critical contribution is expected.