Long-Term Joint EU-AU Research and Innovation Partnership on Renewable Energy

ongoing

The LEAP-RE programme aligns with and responds to the AU-EU high-level policies and specific objectives of the CCSE Roadmap. It seeks to create a long-term partnership of African and European stakeholders in a quadruple helix approach: government (programme owners and funding agencies), research and academia, private sector, and civil society. Impact will be sought by creating a framework, methodology, and cooperation model. The aim is to reduce fragmentation by aligning existing bilateral and multilateral frameworks. LEAP-RE establishes and jointly implements research, innovation, and capacity-building activities that respond to the Multi-Annual Roadmaps (MARs) developed in PRE-LEAP-RE. The programme opted for a large-scale, inclusive consortium of 96 partners from 34 countries and 2 international organisations, to ensure a broad thematic, geographical and stakeholder coverage, and to demonstrate the feasibility of the collaboration and build trust in view of a long-term partnership addressing the post-2025 period. LEAP-RE draws on the experience and partnership developed in PRE-LEAP-RE, which conceptualised and developed a framework for long-term, bi-regional cooperation in research, innovation, and capacity building in renewable energies. This partnership is further strengthened by previous collaboration between partners in other projects supporting the EU-Africa HLPD on STI, such as LEAP-Agri, ERAfrica, LEAP4FNSSA, RINEA, and CAAST-Net Plus. Furthermore, the proposal includes a number of R&I partners, 8 individual projects (formalised as Work Packages), which were chosen among expressions of interest received in late 2019.