WASHINGTON, D.C. – Partners of the Americas is pleased to announce the launch of the latest Innovation Fund competition in partnership with Cementos Progreso and the Department of State.
The 100,000 Strong in the Americas Innovation Fund is the Department’s signature hemispheric-wide education initiative. The Innovation Fund is the trusted mechanism that creates enduring links between governments, academia, and business to build institutional capacity, increase academic mobility programs, champion the power of education in transforming societies, and provide opportunity to more students in the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
Innovation Fund partnerships between the United States and Latin America provide more students with access to dynamic academic exchange programs, short-term programs to work in teams, and to gain technical skills critical for today’s workforce. As of March 2019, the Innovation Fund has awarded 198 grants to teams of 370 higher education institutions (HEIs) in 25 countries and 42 U.S. States.
This new Innovation Fund Grant Competition for the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador will award up to eight (8) grants to support new HEI partnerships between universities and colleges in the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
The 2019 Innovation Fund Competition for U.S.-Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador Higher Education Partnerships is supported by investments from Cementos Progreso and the U.S. Department of State.
“We are very pleased to participate in the 100,000 Strong in the Americas Innovation Fund initiative of the U.S. Department of State, which reaffirms our commitment to strengthening the capacities of our youth. In this way, Cementos Progreso continues to contribute to building the country we want to live in,” adds José Raúl González, CEO of Cementos Progreso.
Teams of HEIS are invited to submit Innovation Fund grant proposals to focus on exchange and training programs in academic areas of Environmental Studies, Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Natural Resource Management, STEM, or Entrepreneurship with emphasis on addressing solutions to environmental issues in the eligible countries.
Innovation Fund grants are typically $25,000 each—with matching contributions from grant-winning teams that average $1.80 for every grant dollar—to implement new student exchange and training programs in the United States and Latin America. Currently, over 1,880 higher education institutions subscribe to the Innovation Network – including 1,000 universities / colleges in the United States.
The deadline to submit proposals for this Innovation Fund grant competition is August 15, 2019. For more information, see the Request for Proposals here.
