The G&A grant information meetings

The main objective of the information sessions was to present the GMES and Africa Programme to all the five regions and more specifically to share important information on the Call for Proposals for preparation for the award of 17,500,000 Euro competitive grants to potential beneficiaries.

The G&A info-sessions, also called Grant Information meeting (GIM), were held in the five AUC regions, i.e.:

• The Eastern Africa region (Kigali on 17th – 18th February 2017),
• the Western Africa region (Dakar on 1st – 2nd March 2017),
• the Southern Africa region (Harare on 15th – 16th March 2017),
• the Northern Africa region (Cairo on 3rd – 4th April 2017), and
• the Central Africa region (Libreville on 12th – 13th April 2017).

It was important that competent institutions within each region were fully aware of the guidelines for grants and procurement rules to enable them to make informed decisions during the entire process of applying to submission of proposals compliant with all the AUC requirements.

During the two-day meetings, eligible participants from each of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) were afforded adequate time to strategize among themselves on the most plausible partnership (consortium) configurations that would be best suited for grant awards.  

The outcome of the meetings was that all the participants were fully empowered to clearly define their preferred thematic areas based on 23 applications in either Water and Natural Resources or Marine and Coastal Areas.  Their proposals would have to be aligned to regional priority issues and it was clear that the nitty-gritty of the evaluation criteria would be based on user-centered service development, sustainability, private sector and academia involvement, management capacity among other requirements.