On Wednesday 6th of March 2019, Develop Business and Economic Research Centers Capacity at Palestinian Higher Education Institutions "BERC" conducted its 16th management meeting.

At the beginning the meeting started according the agenda by welcoming and participant's arrival then welcome address by the organizer from Dr. Abdelrahman Ahmad Selwadi and welcome address by project manager- IUG introduced by Amani Al Mqadma.

Then PS Partners introduced their presentations about progress in implemented activities via Business Research centers for the period Dec. 2018- March 2019 - IUG, BZU, QOU, AUG and UCAS.

After that, quality of project implementation and third year quality report presented in the meeting. In more details, the report will assess the quality of the project meetings, training and curriculums reformed. The attendees discussed the importance of having sustainability plan for the centers as it was asked for by the EACEA within the midterm report. Therefore, the consortium agreed on the importance of considering the following points in the preparation of the BERCs centers:

· The director is an employee at the university

· The center is endorsed at the university hierarchy

·  Center facilities

·   Role of established research groups

·  The work is already performed by the university professor, but the need is to have institutional framework that ensure the effectiveness and the synergies between exerted efforts by the academic staff.

The sustainability for the research hub was indicated in the notes of the Midterm report by the EACEA. Consequently, the attendees agreed on signing MOUs between the BERC established centers to continue collaboration beyond the project lifetime. In more details, the MOU will encompasses the following elements:

•   Applying for joint projects with different calls

•   Joint supervision for Master thesis

•   Applying for joint programmes

•   Use of resources

•    Joint workshops, seminars and conferences.

The arrangement for the next training in UAL- Spain also taking a part in this meeting as a part of future activities for the coming period in the project life time, in addition to arranging for summer school in business and economic research methods, all Gazan partners have announced for the summer school and students and interested participants have registered. Lecturers from IUG, AUG and UCAS are participating in the delivery of the summer school.

The last part discussed in this meeting was the project closing and reporting and technical and financial reports. The consortium has agreed to start finalizing the technical reports according to the form that will be sent by IUG. Moreover, all partners will provide the supporting documents for the financial statement.