The Diplomat
The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) will allocate up to five million euros this year to subsidize innovation projects for development in the framework of the Spanish Cooperation Strategy against COVID-19.
According to the call, published this week by the Official State Gazette (BOE), the objective of these grants is “the co-financing of projects that address social economic environmental and development problems of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development, within the framework of the Spanish Cooperation Strategy to combat COVID-19”.
The call has a maximum budget of five million euros, the same as in the previous fiscal year and two million more than in 2019. This amount will be used to subsidize projects that propose innovative solutions already successfully tested in pilot phase, in order to apply and replicate them on a larger scale to amplify their positive impact on disadvantaged populations.
The geographic scope of each project must be limited to a single country of partnership, either from the group of least developed countries or middle-income countries, or one of the countries considered advanced cooperation countries under the current Spanish Cooperation Master Plan (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay, in Latin America; Cape Verde, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea and Tunisia, in Africa; and Jordan in the Middle East). Proposals located in Algeria, Sudan or Lebanon will also be eligible.
Clusters of private sector companies, corporate foundations, non-governmental development organizations (NGDOs), universities, university foundations and research centers will be eligible for these grants. In order to promote networking and alliance work, the groups must be made up of at least two entities of different types and one of them must belong to the private business sector.
Public administrations, international or multilateral organizations and any entity in whose capital stock a public administration participates, with the exception of academic and research entities, are not eligible to participate. In order to qualify as successful bidders, the entities forming the group must be legally incorporated in Spain and have the legal capacity to act. In the case of companies, they must have a registered office and tax domicile in Spain.
Since 2019, the AECID carries out an external assessment of the innovation component of the proposals submitted, with the collaboration of the Ministry of Science, Innovation (General Secretariat for Innovation and the Center for Industrial Technological Development of Spain, CDTI).
