<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) has launched its call for grants for innovation projects for development in 2025, with a maximum award of €11 million.</strong></h4> These grants are intended to finance innovation projects by companies, universities, and NGOs that address social, economic, environmental, and development challenges of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, <span class="HwtZe" lang="en"><span class="jCAhz ChMk0b"><span class="ryNqvb">as published last Tuesday in the Official State Gazette (BOE).</span></span></span> These actions should promote innovative solutions, already developed and successfully tested at the pilot level, in order to implement them and demonstrate the possibility of replicating them on a larger scale to achieve sustainable and inclusive development. Likewise, the scalability and replicability of innovative solutions already successfully implemented in Spanish Cooperation partner countries may be co-financed. Innovation initiatives may be developed in one or more countries indicated in the call for proposals: specifically, the priority countries for Latin America and the Caribbean are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. For North Africa and the Middle East, the priority countries are Morocco, Mauritania, the Sahrawi refugee population, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon. In sub-Saharan Africa, the list includes Cape Verde, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Ethiopia, Equatorial Guinea, and Mozambique. In Asia, the priority countries are Afghanistan, the Philippines, and Syria, while in Europe, only Ukraine is listed. Knowledge initiatives in the field of innovation that include applied research and studies accompanied by training or seminars, that have an innovative component, and that relate to the thematic areas included in this call for proposals will also be funded. These knowledge-building actions are not conventional cooperation projects, but rather will be aimed at strengthening the capacities of AECID and Spanish Cooperation actors. The knowledge-building actions will be carried out in Spain and may, where appropriate, contribute to improving cooperation work in all the countries and territories where Spanish Cooperation operates. The call is aimed at companies (including social economy companies, business associations and other similar organizations, Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) registered with the AECID (Spanish Agency for International Development) and academic and research entities (universities, university foundations, research centers and other similar entities, both public and private). Public administrations, international or multilateral organizations and agencies, and any entity in which a public administration participates are not eligible to benefit from these grants, except in the case of academic and research entities. The initial amount of the call is one million euros and may be extended with an additional credit up to a maximum of 10,000,000 euros, reaching the eleven million euros announced on February 28 by the AECID. The minimum grant per innovation action may not be less than 400,000 euros, nor more than 900,000 euros, while the minimum grant to finance knowledge actions may not be less than 100,000 euros and no more than 500,000 euros. This total amount is similar to the 11.5 million euros in the 2024 call, which, in turn, represented a 28 percent increase compared to the nine million euros of the previous year. In 2023, there was already a 135 percent increase compared to 2022, in a call that has only increased in recent years. In 2019, up to three million euros were offered, and the amount increased to five million between 2020 and 2021, two years clearly conditioned by the need to increase support for innovation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 2024 call, thirteen proposals for innovation actions and five for knowledge actions were selected. The approved proposals (announced in November) received a total of 9.5 million euros. million euros for innovation and knowledge-building initiatives in the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and Spain. A total of 122 applications were submitted.
