Support to the implementation of the EU-Africa Research and Innovation Partnership on Food and Nutrition Security & Sustainable Agriculture (FNSSA)
The funded proposal will create a support structure for the implementation of the EU-Africa Research and Innovation Partnership on Food and Nutrition Security & Sustainable Agriculture (FNSSA). Activities will provide support to build a knowledge base on developments and current status of projects funded under Horizon 2020 and previous EU research programmes and relevant programmes to FNSSA funded from other sources. It will also encourage creating strong links to projects funded by the EU's development programmes or bilateral projects funded by the EU Member States and African partners. This structure will give full support to the Bureau of the EU-AU High Level Policy Dialogue (HLPD) on science and technology and innovation, which is the final responsible organ. It will support the HLPD in monitoring and evaluating the outputs of the R&I Partnership and its cluster of H2020 projects (the HLPD Bureau will define the exact request each year). Activities will help analyse the impact of relevant EU-Africa research and innovation projects funded by the EU in FNSSA domain. Activities will contribute to human and institutional capacity building and provide the basis for turning the EU-Africa R&I Partnership on FNSSA into a long-term platform for collaboration. They are expected to run for at least four years.
The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of up to EUR 5 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.
Following adoption of the FNSSA roadmap in 2016 there is a need to create a platform for exchanging information between different projects and to look for synergies between different funding mechanisms implementing the R&I Partnership on FNSSA. The partnership is a ten-year flexible research and innovation programme for which a long-term governance mechanism needs to be created.
In the short to medium term the work will result in
- the creation of a true cluster of projects in support of a coherent implementation of the EU-Africa R&I Partnership to optimise research and innovation programmes relevant to FNSSA;
- support to EU-AU HLPD Bureau as a part of the implementation of the R&I Partnership on FNSSA.
In the long term activities will strengthen networking and collaboration and provide the basis for turning the EU-Africa R&I Partnership on FNSSA into a long-term platform for collaboration.