Livia Mercatelli graduated from the University of Bologna in International Relations and Diplomatic Affairs with a thesis on South-South cooperation for development (the case of China FDIs in Africa). She deepened her studies on ‘project writing’ with a focus on EU funding programmes for development first with an internship at a Spanish NGO and then at the University of Parma through an intensive course offered in collaboration with an Italian NGO.
She is an officer of the International Relations Department of the University of Bologna since 2008. Here, she started working on EU funding for HEIs development and cooperation, then she moved to the unit in charge of the management of Erasmus Mundus Action 2 projects and related academic mobility. In this context, she extensively worked with institutions in Latin America, South Africa, North Africa, Western Balkans and India.
Since 2015, she works at the Latin America, Africa, Middle East and Western Balkans Unit where she is in charge of following the relations the University has in the Sub-Saharan Africa under different frameworks, including managing academic mobility of students and staff, designing agreements and MoUs, designing and managing capacity building projects.
In 2017, she has coordinated the contents’ production of a MOOC about personal risk reduction during academic mobility in insecure contexts. Her main expertise is about academic individual mobility and mobility schemes with developing countries, design of cooperation agreements, design of initiatives for HEIs development, external funding for university internationalization and cooperation with non-EU partners.