Deadline: 9 January 2015
The United Kingdom’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) is accepting grant applications from organizations in South East Asian countries (Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam ) for the South East Asia Prosperity Fund 2015.
Priority Funding Areas: The South East Asia Prosperity Fund particularly focuses on projects that
- Lead to increased cross border trade and investment either by reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers, by liberalization of key sectors, improved trade facilitation or enhanced investment protection.
- Support financial sector reform and integration, in the areas of international financial standards and regulations, capital markets, banking, insurance, Islamic Finance standards and development, anti-money laundering frameworks.
- Lead to the development and adoption of effective public private partnership frameworks, as a means to infrastructure financing.
- Encourage improvements to the business environment for domestic and foreign firms, through a rules-based economic system, regulatory reform, and closer engagement with global economic policy institutions and fora. This will include projects that level the playing field for all firms by-
- Promoting transparency in government and businesses, focusing on public procurement, facilitation payments and business licensing; engaging with international transparency initiatives including Open Government Partnership (OGP) and Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).
- Enabling a non-discriminatory and transparent intellectual property regime, including by building capacity on implementation and enforcement; adoption of key international IP agreements.
- Encouraging greater adoption of international product standards.
- Strengthening national competition policy regimes.
Eligibility Criteria
- Proposals can be made for bilateral (single country) or regional projects.
- The grant support will be directed to projects that
- Help governments to engage progressively in international and multilateral climate change fora, in particular to achieve the ambitious new global agreement all UNFCCC parties have agreed to secure by 2015.
- Work with governments to reduce existing and future carbon emissions from the energy sector through better legislation, regulation, policy-making, financing and implementation. Proposals are welcome both on the energy supply side, and on the reduction of energy demand, in particular through improved energy efficiency in key sectors.
- Work with governments or cities to encourage low carbon economic growth through better legislation, regulation, policy-making, financing and implementation.
- Encourage significant and scalable carbon emissions reductions in key sectors like energy, agriculture, transport, waste and land use.
- Support the objectives to increase international and domestic ambition to tackle climate change.
- Climate change adaptation projects, projects that have significant capital costs, projects working solely in Cambodia, Lao PDR, Brunei, and Singapore are not supported by the grant. But regional projects in Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam that involve these countries will be considered.
Note: Organizations are strongly encouraged to get in touch with the British Embassy or British High Commission in the country where the project will operate to discuss their draft project proposal.
For more information, please visit Call for Proposals.
