During 2017, RACI was the organization chosen by the Embassy of New Zealand to co-manage the fund granted to organizations in Argentina and Paraguay.
The Network received 80 proposals of projects between the two countries, where 52 projects were produced by Civil Society Organizations from Argentina, and the remaining 28 came from 13 of the 17 departments in the Republic of Paraguay.
From the closing date of the call for entries, RACI evaluated all the proposals under the same objective scoring system which is based on the analysis of the following categories: profile of the organization, viability of the project, characteristics of the project, rigor of the project and evaluation of the budget.
The four topics proposed by the Embassy were: “Education and youth”, “sustainable development”, “democratic strengthening of institutions through innovation” and “renewable energy”. In both countries, the most discussed topics were the first two, which were present in the winning proposals.
Based on the results of the evaluation of RACI, the organizations selected by the Embassy of New Zealand were: Pedemonte Foundation, Huellas para un Futuro Foundation, Lengua Franca and Yvy Porá Foundation. All are Argentinian institutions except for the last one based in Paraguay.
The proposals selected were diverse and innovative. In the case of the Pedemonte Foundation, the organization proposes a trail located in the province of Mendoza, more specifically in Villa El Challao, marked with information about the ecosystem, landscape values, its environmental and patrimonial components, and its role in alluvial control.
For its part, the Huellas para un Futuro Foundation presented the second phase of a project started in 2015 which aims to strengthen and expand the reproduction capacity of the stevia plant in order to multiply the number of beneficiaries in a shorter time.
The Lengua Franca project seeks to contribute to the inclusion of adolescents and young people with intellectual disabilities in regular schools by creating books with stories of Argentine authors adapted to the Easy Reading (ER) system. The ER is a strategy of democratization of reading based on internationally agreed standards (IFLA) that spans the lexicon, grammar, content, illustrations, design and edition. With this material, the organization seeks to equip school and public libraries in the City of Buenos Aires.
Finally, the project of the Yvy Porá Foundation aims to develop a self-sustaining model of production and marketing of poultry in the Y’ary Mirĩ Indigenous Community, which after years of living as waste pickers on unproductive and flooded land, decided to move to a more productive and healthy area for the development of their families and community.