A Farewell to UniPID – and a Tale of Successfully Navigating Difficult (Pandemic) Times, Achieving Milestones, and Moving Forward to New Endeavours.

As 2025 draws to a close, it also marks the end of a significant era for UniPID: the University of Helsinki chapter. After five years of supportive hosting, the UniPID Coordination Unit is leaving the University’s walls, with the firm assurance that our close collaboration will continue well into the future. In this piece, Maria Brockhaus, Vice Member of the UniPID Board, offers a warm farewell and a short reflection on UniPID’s 23-year journey, five of which were proudly and joyfully spent at the University of Helsinki.

In 2002, calls for institutional partnerships to take on global challenges of development led to the creation of UniPID, a unique effort to bring together Finnish Universities around issues of development. Since then, led by a coordination unit, UniPID is navigating the complex intersection of development, education, research and associated policy and politics.

We at the University of Helsinki are very proud that we had the privilege to host the coordination unit for the past 5 years in the Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry. We could build on many successful years of UniPID being at the University of Jyväskylä and will now be handing over the baton to the University of Eastern Finland at the start of 2026.

During these past years, the landscape in which UniPID (net)works kept changing at high speed. A global pandemic posed challenges to the smooth transition of UniPID from Jyväskylä to the University of Helsinki, including a change in the leadership of the Coordination Unit. At the same time, the pandemic fundamentally challenged UniPID’s core tasks: how knowledge sharing among network members and partners could be fostered, how collaboration and joint learning could take place, and how capacity building and science–policy interaction could be facilitated.

Despite all these challenges, in short, yes, UniPID can! And I am in awe, seeing how over the past 5 year, UniPID and its coordination unit found constantly new ways to adapt to a changing global, social, and political environment, within and beyond Finnish Universities. UniPID is relevant and innovative, remaining successful in fundraising for network activities, engaging with new partners, new platforms, and new programs (and new challenges, of course), while keeping all of us in the extended UniPID family together. Thank you for an exciting and breathtaking journey over the past 5 years. We look ahead to the coming years with the University of Helsinki now stepping into the backseat, while holding deep appreciation for all that we have achieved together, and all that still lies ahead. Thank you.