The Mara-Mediterra Partnership had been anxiously awaiting to have news about the outcome of the PRIMA Call issued in 2021. All partners were therefore in attendance of the virtual meeting organized by the PRIMA Secretariat to announce which project proposals had been successfully retained for EU funding.
As Mohamed Shinawi, on behalf of the PRIMA Secretariat, shared his screen with a presentation entitled Prima Call 2021 – Section 1 results, all of us would have shared the reaction on the chat line by one of the participants who wrote ‘NOW with the big announcement’.
Mohamed Wageih’s entry in the chat line appeared as Mohamed Shinawi reiterated on the budget allocation for each of the PRIMA Call 2021 Themes and the maximum number of projects that could therefore have been selected for funding. With over one hundred project proposal submissions to the ‘Water’ Theme, he remarked that regretfully the success rate could not be higher than a mere 3 percent.
His next slides showed further overall statistics about the proposals that had been submitted to each of the themes, including the geographic distribution of proposal coordinators and partners, all of which clearly demonstrated the intense competition the PRIMA Call had created in all corners of the Mediterranean.
When his presentation proceeded to the announcement of the ‘winners’, the Mara-Mediterra Partnership learned that its submission had in fact come in very first position for funding under the ‘Water’ Theme!
Mohamed Shinawi welcomed the fact that the Mara-Mediterra Partnership is made up of both public entities, including decision-making bodies and universities, as well as private entities, including SMEs and an industry. He then went on to announce that Mara-Mediterra’s sister projects under the ‘Water’ Theme would be REACT4MED and SALAM-MED.
By then, the chatline had been overtaken by entries of the Mara-Mediterra Partnership, expressing the obvious joy yet also profound gratefulness to the PRIMA Secretariat of having been selected for funding.
The outcomes of the PRIMA Call 2021 were announced in a virtual event organized on 25 November 2021, ahead of Mediterranean Day. Mediterranean Day, also known as International Day of the Mediterranean and Day of the Mediterranean, is the annual commemoration of the foundation of the Barcelona Process on 28 November 1995.
The announcement confirmed that Mara-Mediterra had been selected for funding through the PRIMA partnership for research and innovation in the Mediterranean area which is supported by Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.
In short, Mara-Mediterra had been conceived!
