New Delhi, Feb 25 : President Pratibha Patil will inaugurate a sub-regional conference of South, South-West and Central Asia on Higher Education here today.

The two-day conference is being organised by the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development and the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) in collaboration with UNESCO.

The theme of the conference is: ''Facing Global and Local Challenges: the New Dynamics for Higher Education'' and is part of a series of regional conferences being organized as prelude to the World Conference on Higher Education to be convened by UNESCO in July this year.

The conference is an attempt to highlight a range of issues concerning higher education at the global, regional and national levels. These broadly include access, equity, financing, governance, quality assurance and sustainable development pertaining to higher education for the next century. Higher education also needs to re-examine the methods of educational enquiry or pedagogic practices, including those of research and innovation. In today''s highly networked world, interactions through distance learning modes have become more efficient.

The potential of information and communication technologies to create local knowledge content on global platforms is enormous and needs to be harnessed to bring education to all.

The conference seeks to bring together ministers of education, senior representatives of national governments, educationists, academics, NGOs, policy makers and stakeholders in higher education from 14 countries including Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Iran and Afghanistan.

The papers to be given would incorporate country reports from the fourteen countries and would also discuss the current status and future directions of higher education. The Conference would be a platform for the exchange of ideas and aims to create a set of recommendations for further deliberations during the World Conference on Higher Education in July 2009 in Paris.

The objectives of the conference are to examine significant trends and their bearing on higher education, to understand the role of higher education as a driving force for sustainable development and to probe new challenges in terms of achieving "equity" and "quality," that would shape the strategic agenda for the development of higher education in the future. (ANI)