Following the recommendations of the Sixteenth Session of the General Conference of UNESCO and the official offer to host the centre made by the Government of Romania, the UNESCO European Centre for Higher Education (Centre Européen pour l’Enseignement Supérieur – CEPES) was inaugurated in Bucharest on 21 September 1972 and was at the time the only intergovernmental Centre for Higher Education with pan-European coverage, including North America and Israel.

The initial mission of the Centre was to promote cooperation, to disseminate information, and to study innovative trends in higher education, with particular reference to the mobility of students, teachers, and researchers within the Europe Region. An important shift in this mission came in the early 1990s with the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. UNESCO-CEPES was thus called upon to play new roles and assume new tasks related to the process of change which emerged at the level of the entire European region.

The UNITWIN/UNESCO Chairs Programme, launched in 1992, gave UNESCO-CEPES an important tool in this endeavour. The Programme constituted “a major breakthrough with regard to the reinforcement of inter-university co-operation at the sub-regional, regional and interregional levels as a means to improve the quality in higher education as well as to strengthen national capabilities for higher level training and research in the developing countries.

At the diplomatic conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, in April 1997, the joint Council of Europe/UNESCO Convention on the Recognition of Qualifications Concerning Higher Education in the European Region - the so-called Lisbon Recognition Convention - was adopted, and for which UNESCO-CEPES assumed a Co-Secretariat function to the Convention.

From the late 1990s, the Centre increasingly collaborated on European Union projects directed at the reform of higher education in Eastern and Central Europe and reinforced its cooperation with the World Bank and OECD and other international networks and organizations.

In September 2003, UNESCO-CEPES was nominated a consultative member of the Follow-up Group of the Bologna Process (BFUG), tasked with the implementation of the Bologna Process goals, and the realization of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) which came into effect in January 2010.

On 25 September 2009, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between UNESCO and the Romanian Government on transitional arrangements for UNESCO-CEPES. The MoU realigns the Centre’s mandate with the new education landscape in Europe and provides that during the 2010-2011 period CEPES will focus on addressing the higher education needs of UNESCO’s Member States in Central, Eastern and South-East Europe.

For a more detailed historical account of the Centre and its activities please see: