It will bring global universities onto one platform for information sharing, best practices and guidelines for maintaining a healthy campus.

FISU has worked closely with seven pilot universities through 2019 to define criteria for the "Healthy Campus Label" to set standards.

Still to be determined is the final definition of the "toolkit", which will be established after evaluation and feedback from the pilot universities.

"Launching a programme of this importance requires a lot of academic study and benchmarking, because it must be technically well structured," Fernando Parente, director of FISU healthy campus and university relations, said.

"We have now defined the base criteria, which will serve as the basis for the attribution of the 'FISU Healthy Campus' label to universities around the world."

"The biggest challenge that we will face will be reaching the decision makers at each university, which will be imperative to move forward with this project.

"To prepare for this, we have already identified almost all the stakeholders to direct our marketing and promotional efforts towards."

Universities will be graded on a variety of factors around base criteria, with a maximum of 100 points.

Once standards have been finalised, the programme will be ready for a worldwide launch by the end of May 2020.

Pilot universities have responded positively so far.

"Working with FISU in the implementation of the Healthy Campus programme is a great opportunity for our university, for Federación del Deporte Universitario Argentino (FeDUA) and for our country," Emiliano Gordin of the Universidad Nacional de La Matanza, Argentina, said.

La Matanza is one of the seven universities partnering FISU in the pilot phase.

Ian Fitzpatrick of University of Western Australia said: "The University of Western Australia has been really pleased to work alongside FISU on this pilot project.

"It has stimulated many positive interactions on campus between colleagues and opened up communication and awareness between all the areas of the university that have a role to play in providing a healthy campus."

The other pilot universities are University of Johannesburg in South Africa, Universtiy of Turin in Italy, the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia (RUDN) in Moscow, Peking University of China and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, on whose campus the FISU Headquarters are based.

In January 2020, FISU will send the proposal of the "FISU Healthy Campus Standard" to 30 world-recognised experts in the domains of certification, quality systems management, sport and physical activity, nutrition, disease prevention, mental and social health, risk behaviour, environment, sustainability and social responsibility.

This will then be evaluated by experts and feedback will be incorporated to prepare the official launch of the project.