São Paulo – The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) is enrolling companies for projects for the financing of agricultural development in Africa and Latin America. The pre-proposals may be sent by any African or Latin American research and development institution, and by researchers from Embrapa itself, up to February 29th, 2012.
According to the researcher of the International Relations Secretariat at Embrapa, Paulo Duarte, for the selection of projects, criteria like the innovation of proposals, sustainability, potential impact, team competence and project design, among other factors, will be taken into account. The ceiling for financing is US$ 80,000 and the maximum period for the loan is two years.
The financing of projects is part of the mechanisms for agricultural cooperation that the Embrapa has with Africa and Latin America, the first called Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Platform and the second, the Latin America and Caribbean–Brazil Agricultural Innovation Platform.
Members of the managing board of these platforms, which include partner institutions and the Embrapa, will select the proposals. Pre-proposals undergo an initial triage process and from there the selected projects are invited to send full proposals for further analysis by the committee. Duarte says that some ten or twelve projects turned to Africa should be selected as well as five turned to Latin America.
The projects may be sent in four areas, namely “improvement of natural resources”, “strengthening of policies, institutions and markets”, “technologies for greater productivity” and “technologies for agriculture and alleviation of poverty”. All details about registration may be seen on the sites of both platforms (see contact information below), where there are even platforms for virtual discussion.
The mechanism for cooperation in Latin American and the Caribbean was established in October this year and the main partner is the Interamerican Institute for Agricultural Cooperation (IICA). The platform for Africa was released in 2010 and the counterpart is the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (Fara).
Since early this year, through cooperation with Africa, ten projects have been under development, among them projects on cotton varieties and pest management in Tanzania, bee diversity in Ethiopia and rehabilitation of areas degraded by herd grazing in Kenya. In all the projects selected, the Embrapa is present, as the idea of the platforms is agricultural cooperation. According to Duarte, in the previous selection process, proposals were received from Arab countries, like Morocco and Algeria, but they were not chosen.
Information
E-mails: contact@africa-brazil.org and contact@lac-brazil.org
Sites: www.africa-brazil.org and www.lac-brazil.org
*Translated by Mark Ament
