From 26 to 29 October, the Executive Director of the EU-LAC Foundation, Dr Adrián Bonilla, and the Senior Programme Manager for Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation, and Culture, Dr Anna Barrera Vivero, undertook a mission to Paris to strengthen ties with existing partners, to discuss possible joint activities in the framework of the French Presidency of the European Council, and to present the Foundation to new potential partners.
During this mission, the Executive Director and the Senior Programme Manager held a total of eight meetings with officials and strategic partners. On the first day of activities, they met with the new Director of the OECD Development Centre, Ragnheiður Elín Árnadóttir, followed by a meeting with the Head of Latin America and the Caribbean, OECD Development Centre, Sebastián Parra. In these meetings, they recapitulated the cooperation of both parties during the past years and agreed on the great interest in further developing this partnership via activities like the multi-actor subnational dialogues on “Development in Transition” in 2022.
Likewise, Dr Bonilla and Dr Barrera met with Michèle Ramis, the new Director of the Americas and Caribbean Department of the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, to delineate the activities planned with its long-standing strategic partner “Institut des Ameriques (IdA)” for 2022, in particular the Annual Colloquium. In this sense, the Foundation’s delegation met with President Yves Saint-Geours, Carlos Quenan, Juliette Serafini, Virginie Aron, and Zully Rojas López of the IdA, to follow up on these joint activities. They discussed numerous topics of their strategic partnership and arrived at important agreements related to their common work, for example, the updating of the data of French actors for the Foundation’s MAPEO database.
Similarly, they attended meetings with further important organisations such as the Political Observatory of Latin America and the Caribbean (OPALC) from Sciences Po where they came together with the Executive Director Gaspard Estrada, and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) concerning the institutional structure of the Foundation, its mandate, and its thematic areas, as well as strategies to boost the reduced interest of various EU countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Dr Bonilla and Dr Barrera held productive exchanges with Jyoti Hosagrahar, Deputy Director of the World Heritage Centre; Mauro Rosi, Chief of Latin America and the Caribbean Unit; Ernesto Ottone, Deputy Director General for Culture; and Pablo Guayasamin Madrinan, Project Coordinator, Office of the Assistant Director-General for Culture of UNESCO, where those present agreed on the great momentum to raise awareness of the role of culture for sustainable development on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 2022.
The mission to Paris yielded overall very positive outcomes for the EU-LAC Foundation. The Executive Director and the Senior Programme Manager were able to follow up on events, to reach consensus on upcoming activities, as well as to establish new and promising contacts with a new and important partner – UNESCO, both in the realm of Culture and Science and Higher Education.
