African Union Research Grant : OPEN CALL 2012

As demonstrated at the “Science with Africa” Conference in Addis Ababa the 3-5 March 2008, in many African countries, since years, there are research activities conducted at national and international level by African researchers.

The Africa’s Science and Technology Consolidated Plan of Action (CPA) implementation strategy, endorsed by AMCOST III Mombasa 2007, calls upon the African Union commission (AUC) to identify innovative ways that will foster the implantation of the CPA and to ensure more participation and involvement of the African Scientists and Institutions in the CPA implementation efforts.

It is now compulsory to strengthen the capacities of African researchers and scientists by facilitating the integration of their efforts for the sustainable development of the Africa continent. The cooperation on specific scientific topics, sharing data and scientific knowledge, at national, continental and international level will create the conditions for better understanding and solving the African problems via the African scientists. The already existing scientific excellence will be acknowledged via a transparent evaluation procedure. In this way the African Union Commission will provide the support to those institutions and consortia able to consolidate their scientific excellence at supranational and African continental level. The pragmatic challenges for the African researchers will be to work together creating supra-national consortia complementing among themselves their scientific competences.

The AUC - Human Resources Science and Technology (HRST) Department will structure, launch and implement public calls for research proposals at the African continent level with the main aim to strengthen the research capacity of the African infrastructures by consolidating, sharing and networking their accumulated asset of scientific knowledge. The AUC-HRST will be responsible to structure and implement the whole research selection process (identification, evaluation, contracting and monitoring) during the three year project. This experience will allow HRST Dpt accumulating the necessary knowledge asset to be further developed in a future African research framework programme.

The Second Call for Research Projects and Proposals will be limited to the following science and technology strategic priority actions:

* Post-harvest and Agriculture
Research projects may address the following issues:
o Food security and productivity
o Crop-livestock integration
o Fisheries and aquatic management
o Agricultural policy and commercialization, marketing of agricultural produce
* Renewable and sustainable energy
Research projects may address the following issues:
o Sustainable energy at a local and regional level
o Renewable energy use and its impact on the environment
o Innovative approach to Renewable and sustainable energy
o Measures for making sustainable energy more widespread
* Water and sanitation
o Water for livelihood
o Water for agriculture
o Social and economic dimensions of water resources management

EVALUATION PROCEDURE
The African Union Commission (AUC) will ensure a confidential, fair and equitable evaluation of all proposals. The evaluation will be carried out by independent experts chosen by the AUC which will assure also their responsibility and coordination.
The evaluation and selection of proposals will proceed as follows:

* Verification of the proposal eligibility by the AUC-HRST staff;
* Confidential evaluation of the proposals by independent scientific experts (constraint to rotation);
* Initial ranking of proposals by the AUC-HRST staff upon indication by the experts for the preparation of a draft shortlist of the proposals to fund;
* Examination of the evaluation process, a discussion on the results and the provision of an opinion on the shortlist by the Advisory Management Committee (permanent body) composed by scientific and research experts of the five African regions;
* Final selection by the AUC-HRST department and presentation of shortlisted retained proposals to the AMCOST Bureau for approval;
* Communication of the results of the evaluation and funding decision to the proposal coordinators by the HRST Department Director.

This full procedure will take approximately six months to be completed starting from the deadline of proposal presentation.

EVALUATION CRITERIA
See details in the Grant Guidelines file

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