Lecturer to teach project management in Europe

Dr Kosheek Sewchurran of UCT's Department of Information Systems has been named as one of only 20 international scholars - from a pool of some 1 600 applicants - to win one of this year's European Union Erasmus Mundus scholarships.

Named after the famed Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus, said to be the most influential humanist of the Northern Renaissance, the scholarship will allow Sewchurran to travel to Italy, Scotland and Sweden, where he will teach students enrolled for their master's in strategic project management.

The Erasmus Mundus Programme aims to globalise European education, and Sewchurran will hope to breathe some African ideas into the study of project management in the three countries.

The practice of project management in Africa - think the countless service-delivery issues - could well reshape classic project management, he says. Take, for example, new information-systems projects here. "You not only affect the technology, you literally affect the culture, the way people work, the things they should value - you affect it at a very deep, cultural level."

These are the lessons Sewchurran will teach as he spends a total of three months over the next two years at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland; Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy; and Umea University in Umea, Sweden.