Erasmus+ Capacity Building in Higher Education (CBHE) is an EU funding strand that supports multi-year partnerships between European universities and institutions in partner countries, including across Latin America and the Caribbean. This page explains how that mechanism works and how its regional cluster meetings function, with agricultural and wine-related education as one example of the fields it has supported.
CBHE projects are not individual grants to single researchers; they fund consortia of universities working together on a defined goal, often curriculum development, staff training, or institutional capacity-building in a specific discipline. The programme periodically convenes projects working in the same region or on related themes so that participating institutions can compare results and methods, rather than each consortium working in isolation for its full funding period.
How Erasmus+ CBHE supports Latin American higher education
The European Commission's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) administers CBHE calls, which fund projects lasting several years and typically covering several partner-country universities alongside EU institutions. Latin America and the Caribbean has been a recurring target region for this funding since well before the current funding period, with projects spanning agriculture, health, engineering and other fields where partner universities identify a capacity gap. Agricultural and wine-related programmes, including partnerships focused on viticulture and oenology curricula, have been one strand among many funded this way; the historical VitaGLOBAL project, coordinated by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili with OBREAL and partner universities across Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, South Africa and Georgia, was one such project before it closed in 2023.
Cluster meetings: what they are for
A cluster meeting groups together multiple CBHE (or broader Erasmus+) projects active in the same region or working on related themes, giving project coordinators a venue to present results, exchange practical lessons on partnership management, and in some cases make new institutional contacts for future cooperation. Regional cluster and contact-making events for Latin America and the Caribbean have continued in multiple formats over the years, including as online sessions during periods when in-person travel was restricted, and more recently as in-person regional weeks organized jointly by DG EAC and EACEA together with national university associations in the host country.
Why this matters for agricultural and wine education specifically
Because CBHE projects in agriculture and food science (including viticulture and oenology) sit within this broader regional funding structure, a cluster meeting is typically where such a project's coordinators would present curriculum outcomes, mobility results or capacity-building lessons to other EU-funded projects working in the same countries, whether or not those other projects share the same subject area. This is also where lessons on practical issues, such as credit recognition across universities or managing a multi-country partnership, tend to circulate between otherwise unrelated projects.
Checklist: understanding a CBHE cluster meeting reference
- Confirm whether a "cluster meeting" refers to a CBHE-specific session or a broader Erasmus+ regional week that includes CBHE projects among other programme strands.
- Check the year and format (online or in-person) separately, since both have varied across editions.
- Distinguish EACEA's administrative role (funding, convening) from the academic content presented by individual project consortia at the meeting.
- Treat specific agenda items or presentations from a given project as needing direct confirmation from that project's own materials, since general information about cluster meetings does not confirm what any one project specifically presented.
Comparing funding and convening mechanisms
| Mechanism | Function | Administered by |
|---|---|---|
| Erasmus+ CBHE project | Multi-year, multi-institution capacity-building partnership | Individual university consortia, funded via EACEA |
| Regional cluster meeting | Cross-project exchange of results and lessons within a region | DG EAC / EACEA, often with local university associations |
| Regional Erasmus+ week | Broader programme event, cluster sessions plus contact-making | DG EAC / EACEA and host-country partners |
For more on how projects like VitaGLOBAL structured their work, see VitaGLOBAL in Pasaporte Global and VitaGLOBAL week in South America, and for broader coverage of higher-education and industry news, see news and updates.
