The Diplomat
The Spain-Chile Joint Fund will carry out four new joint cooperation projects in Latin America and the Caribbean, worth 415,000 euros, in the areas of educational innovation in the post-pandemic period, children’s rights and youth support, renewable energies and training of public employees with a human rights approach.
The four projects were approved last Monday during the meeting of the Joint Fund Committee at the headquarters of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) in Madrid, which was attended by the director of the agency, Antón Leis, and the director of the Chilean Agency for International Development Cooperation (AGCID), Enrique O’Farrill.
Prior to the Committee meeting, Leis held a meeting with O’Farrill, during which he expressed Spanish Cooperation’s commitment to deepening collaboration mechanisms on such fundamental issues as gender equity, access to education, preservation of the environment and the fight against climate change, as pillars of fair and inclusive public policies, and explained the new features of the new Spanish Law on Cooperation for Sustainable Development and Global Solidarity -currently before Congress-, which “includes the concept of development in transition and the need to promote forms of cooperation with countries such as Chile that wish to address a series of fundamental challenges in the fight against inequality, participatory and innovative public policies and climate action”.
On the Chilean side, Enrique O’Farrill stated that “international cooperation for development must go beyond traditional financial aid and include new modalities, innovative instruments for knowledge exchange, technology transfer and resource mobilization.” “Spain has realized that development is not based solely on criteria such as per capita income, as this does not reflect the multidimensional vulnerabilities and structural gaps of countries,” he added.
During the meeting of the Spain-Chile Joint Cooperation Fund Committee, chaired by Antón Leis and Enrique O’Farrill, four joint initiatives were approved for a total amount of around 415,000 euros. Specifically, these are the project Mobilizing effective and innovative pedagogical practices based on comparative evidence, with the participation of the Ministries of Education of ten countries in Latin America and the Caribbean; the initiative Training in competencies for public servants of the Ombudsman for Children’s Rights with a human rights approach; the second phase of the triangular cooperation project with Chile and Paraguay Educating through physical activity and sport we can transform reality; and the project Development of renewable hydrogen explorer, with the Ministry of Energy of Chile.
The Spain-Chile Joint Cooperation Fund is governed by the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2014 by the respective Ministries of Foreign Affairs with the aim of strengthening technical cooperation between Chile and Spain and promoting the development of Latin America and the Caribbean through the joint implementation of triangular and South-South cooperation projects. It has an Executive Secretariat, within the AGCID, and a Technical Committee as a decision-making body, formed by the AGCID, the AECID and the Embassy of Spain in Chile. Financial contributions are disbursed 50/50 by Spain and Chile.
