The Diplomat
The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) has raised by one million euros the maximum amount allocated to grants for humanitarian action in 2021.
According to the annual call for grants for development cooperation actions in the field of humanitarian action 2021, published last Tuesday in the Official State Gazette (BOE), the beneficiaries will be non-governmental development organizations accredited as such by the AECID and that have demonstrated capacity for humanitarian interventions in accordance with the criteria of the European Commission. Public administrations, international or multilateral organizations and any entity in which the public administration participates, either in the share capital or in the assets, are excluded as possible awardees.
The objective of the call is to contribute, within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to the lines of action envisaged both in the V Master Plan for Spanish Cooperation 2018-2021 and in the strategic documents of Spanish Cooperation, with special attention to the Humanitarian Action Strategy 2019-2026, the AECID’s 2020-2021 humanitarian context strategies and the strategic lines of Spanish Cooperation’s response to the COVID-19 crisis.
To this end, these grants will finance humanitarian actions by NGDOs aimed at prevention, emergency response, attention to chronic crises, rehabilitation or early recovery of populations in situations immediately following natural or human-caused disasters and protection actions in favor of victims of conflicts or similar exceptional situations, according to the resolution of the Presidency of the AECID.
Only projects that develop the Humanitarian Action Strategy of the V Master Plan will be eligible for funding, especially in the sectors of health, water, food security and nutrition, protection of affected populations, especially vulnerable populations (minors, especially unaccompanied minors, women, victims of sexual violence or gender violence, victims of human trafficking, refugees or internally displaced persons) and education in emergencies.
The initial amount of the call is 100,000 euros, but it may be increased with an additional credit up to a maximum of 11 million euros. The minimum amount that can be requested per project is 400,000 euros. The maximum amount that can be requested per project is 600,000.
The previous 2020 call, which was directly framed within the Spanish Cooperation response to COVID-19, could not exceed €10 million, with the same maximum and minimum amounts for each project. Finally, AECID approved grants for 16 projects, almost all valued at around €600,000 (up to a total of €9.95 million) and half of them to address the consequences of the pandemic in countries such as Palestine, El Salvador, Guatemala, Niger, Iraq, Lebanon and Bangladesh. In 2019, the total maximum of grants for humanitarian action was six million euros, although the final total amount of grants remained at almost 4.5 million euros.
