Portugal and SEGIB: Facilitating Triangular Interregional Cooperation between Ibero-America and Africa

At the end of 2023, based on a Memorandum with SEGIB, Portugal launched the Portugal-Latin-America-Africa Triangular Cooperation Fund.

The aim of this fund is to support projects that are focused on strategic capacity building and the exchange of experiences between Portuguese-speaking African Countries (PALOPs) and Ibero-American countries, in the following areas: education, health, gender equality, climate change, food security, culture, social cohesion, digital transformation and education for development. The budget of this fund, for a two year period (2024- 2025), amounts to €1,000,000.

This fund is considered to be innovative for two main features: on the one hand, for the way in which initiatives have a specific focus on knowledge; and, on the other, for its vocation to promote an interregional partnership between Europe, Latin-America and Africa. These projects must precisely address either Knowledge generation and dissemination (Category I), or Training, capacity building and/or knowledge transfer (Category II). In addition, initiatives must have at least three partners (Portuguese, Latin-American, and African) which favor the integration between these geographic areas.

The call for proposals was open for two months, and both public and private entities applied. At the end of the period, 340 initiatives were evaluated. This not only demonstrates Ibero-America’s great interest in Triangular Cooperation, but also in promoting partnerships with other regions of the South.

Projects of Portugal-LAC-Africa Fund (2024-2025)

Six projects were selected in this first call (detailed in the table prepared for this purpose), which implementation must be completed by December 2025. These involve 30 institutions from Latin-America, Portugal and Africa and cover the following areas: Climate change (1); Digital transformation (1); Health (1); Education for Development (2) and Culture (1). Regarding the two mentioned categories, 4 projects are associated with Category I, and 2 projects with Category II.

December 2024

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Source and photos: SEGIB and Camões-Instituto da Cooperação e da Língua.