The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, signed yesterday with the director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), Santiago Muñoz Machado, an agreement for the creation of a new comprehensive program of scholarships for training and collaboration, endowed with more than half a million euros and destined to the 22 Academies of the Spanish Language in the world.
The agreement establishes a strategic alliance between the Ministry, through the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and Development (AECID), and the Association of Spanish Language Academies (ASALE) for the management of this program, which will include a grant for a master’s degree in Madrid and a second grant to continue practical training and training collaboration in each of the 22 Academies.
After the signing, Albares emphasized the “shared objective of strengthening the Spanish language in all its achievements, as well as the aspiration to contribute to consolidating the position of Spanish as a strategic instrument of public diplomacy in the international context”. For his part, the director of the RAE stated that “these grants constitute an essential support to the work being carried out, together with the RAE, by the twenty-two academies of the language that make up ASALE”, and will promote “the digitalization of academic works”.
The RAE presides over ASALE, which brings together all the language academies of Spanish-speaking countries, the USA, Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines (a total of 23 academies, including the Spanish one). For its part, AECID has as a priority line the training of human capital of citizens of its priority countries and has already granted more than 500 scholarships to Hispanic American, American, Filipino and Equatorial Guinean citizens since 2003, only within the ASALE-AECID framework for lexicographic training.
