Eduardo González
The director of the Carolina Foundation, José Antonio Sanahuja, announced yesterday that “in the coming days” he will conclude his mandate at the head of this institution after more than five years in office.
“In the coming days, the mandate of the Carolina Foundation management team, which began in September 2018, ends,” Sanahuja wrote in an open letter published yesterday on the organization’s website. “In accordance with its Statutes, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation will appoint a new director, at the proposal of the President of the Government, as executive president of that body, to whom we wish the greatest success,” he continued.
According to Sanahuja, during these more than five years “a new boost has been given to the Carolina scholarships, improving the standards of social commitment, equity and academic performance of the selection process.” Likewise, work was also done “so that the call for master’s degrees responded to a greater extent to the challenges of the 2030 Agenda.”
As a consequence, he assured, “issues such as innovation and technology, social development, the climate crisis and green financing, gender equality, or democracy and human rights are now well represented in the postgraduate call.”
In this period, he continued, “a strong push has also been given to the Studies and Analysis area to respond to the Foundation’s mandate in the generation of expert knowledge and, also, to a need for rigorous and plural analysis,” which “has allowed to organize seminars, summer courses, and the publication of around 300 titles.”
Another advance in these more than five years, stated Sanahuja, has been the reactivation of “the leadership activity and the visitor program, recovering programs such as Women Leaders, or creating new ones, such as Promoters of Change, within the framework of the initiatives on the revitalization of democracy and renewal of the social contract undertaken by the entire Spanish foreign policy and cooperation with Latin America.”
“Finally, the role of the Carolina Foundation as an organization in the Spanish cooperation system has been reaffirmed, as stated, for the first time, in the Law for Sustainable Development and Global Solidarity, approved at the beginning of 2023 with broad support from Congress and the Senate”, assured the until now director. “It is an advanced Law, in which the cooperation activity in higher education carried out by the Foundation with Latin American countries fits well, and with a view to the construction of the Ibero-American space of knowledge and higher education,” he added.
In these years, Sanahuja recalled, “conditions have not always been easy, with exercises with extended budgets and limited resources; or the COVID-19 pandemic, which represented a great logistical challenge for the scholarship recipients to return to their countries of origin, and despite which the call for scholarships was never stopped.”
“The resources in the hands of the Foundation have not yet recovered from the brutal cut that Spanish development aid suffered starting in 2010,” he lamented. An example of this, he stated, is that “the public contribution to the Foundation represents little more than one thousandth of the total Spanish official development aid (ODA), despite the effort made by the AECID, which, it must be highlighted, has doubled its contribution in the last two years.” However, he assured, “we delivered a healthy institution from an economic and financial point of view that allows us to guarantee the solvency and viability of the project.”
The Carolina Foundation is a public-private institution for the promotion of cultural relations and cooperation between Spain and the countries of the Ibero-American Community of Nations, particularly in the scientific, cultural and higher education fields. It functions as a unique instrument of Spanish cooperation in favor of scientific progress, institutional strengthening and academic mobility to promote the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals.
