Meas­ures to estab­lish sus­tain­able joint part­ner structures

Research cooper­a­tion with the coun­tries of the East­ern Part­ner­ship (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Geor­gia, the Repub­lic of Mol­dova and Ukraine) and Cent­ral Asia (Kaza­kh­stan, Kyrgyz­stan, Mon­go­lia, Tajikistan, Turk­menistan and Uzbek­istan) has already increased sig­ni­fic­antly in recent years and has become even more import­ant since 2022 as a res­ult of the Rus­si­an war of aggression.

This call for pro­pos­als is inten­ded to fund pro­jects for the estab­lish­ment or expan­sion of insti­tu­tion­al­ised and sus­tain­able transna­tion­al part­ner­ships in a com­pet­it­ive pro­ced­ure. New research struc­tures and net­works in the part­ner coun­tries (coun­tries of the East­ern Part­ner­ship and Cent­ral Asia, see above) are to be ini­ti­ated or strengthened. At the same time, the part­ner insti­tu­tions should be giv­en improved access to top­ic-ori­ented net­works and research resources in the European Research Area. The part­ner struc­tures must be based on long-term strategies and designed in such a way that they primar­ily strengthen the insti­tu­tions in the part­ner coun­tries and last bey­ond the end of the fund­ing peri­od. To this end, per­son­nel and tech­nic­al resources will be estab­lished or expan­ded to help fur­ther devel­op region­al expert­ise, offer young research­ers prom­ising work pro­spects in the coun­tries men­tioned and also facil­it­ate integ­ra­tion into the European Research Area via the net­works of the Ger­man part­ners. In the long term, the aim is to strengthen the research centres in the tar­get regions. This will also address the ongo­ing chal­lenge of the emig­ra­tion of trained loc­al researchers.

The grants are awar­ded by way of pro­ject fund­ing as a non-repay­able sub­sidy. For explor­at­ory and net­work­ing meas­ures in pre­par­a­tion for a sub­sequent sus­tain­able joint part­ner struc­ture (Mod­ule 2), a grant of up to EUR 40,000 per pro­ject is gen­er­ally provided for the Ger­man side, usu­ally for a peri­od of up to nine months.