The Diplomat
The Spanish multinational company Indra has been awarded, for an amount of 57.6 million euros, the development of the main part of the Consular Digitalization Plan of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, financed with the Next Generation EU Funds.
According to yesterday’s Official State Gazette, the Ministry’s Contracting Board has awarded Indra the Lot 1 of the Development Services of the Consular Digitalization Plan, corresponding to the so-called “Consular Ecosystem”.
The contract was awarded last September 30 through a negotiated procedure without advertising and for an amount of 57,582,294 euros. Indra, a consulting services company in the fields of transport, defense, energy, telecommunications, financial services and public sector services, was one of the two companies that bid for the contract.
The digitization of consular and diplomatic services, together with the improvement of the digitization of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its dependent bodies (AECID and the Cervantes Institute), is one of the priorities of the Foreign Action Strategy 2021-2024, approved by the Government at the end of April.
The recently approved General State Budget (PGE) foresees an allocation of 60 million euros for the digitalization of consular services, as explained last November by the then Undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Celsa Nuño, in the Congress of Deputies. This amount is charged to the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, whose approval by the European Commission (last June) has allowed the disbursement to Spain of the 10,000 million euros corresponding to the first tranche of the Next Generation EU recovery fund.
The Consular Digitalization Plan, as included in the strategic objective of Digitalization of the Administration of the PGE, foresees the development of “a new Consular Ecosystem, shaped as a unified technological platform and implemented in layers, which guarantees the security of the systems and data managed and with a clear orientation towards the citizens, facilitating their access to the services”.
