As Co-Chairs of the Governing Board of the Specific International Programme of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, we are very pleased to inform you that on Friday, 20 September 2019, the Board approved ten projects in the Second Round of the Programme amounting to close to two million dollars. Twenty applications had been submitted by Parties to the Second Round.
The successful projects were submitted by Antigua and Barbuda, Ecuador, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran, Moldova, Nigeria, Peru, Sri Lanka and Zambia.
On behalf of the Board, we would like to congratulate these applicants noting that each project successfully sets out to support capacity-building and technical assistance in support of the implementation of their obligations under the Minamata Convention on Mercury.
As with the First Round in 2018, the Board noted again in 2019 the high interest expressed by Parties in the Specific International Programme. Twenty applications were made to the Second Round with applications received from all regions, including from least developed countries and from small island developing states.
The Board would like to commend all the applicants, whether successful or not in the Second Round, for having prepared and submitted their applications.
Recognising the country needs expressed and the effort invested in the preparation of the applications, for applications that were not approved in this Second Round, the Board proposed a number of recommendations for the applicant to consider for submission to the Third Round. These recommendations will be sent by the Secretariat on behalf of the Board in due course.
The Board would like to sincerely thank Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States for their strong contributions to the Second Round of the Specific International Programme. The resource envelope available for the Second Round represented a doubling of funding, which allowed the Board to approve twice the number of projects in 2019 compared with 2018.
Given the high interest shown in the Programme and the country needs expressed, we hope to be in a position to launch the Third Round soon and in this regard would like to encourage those in a position to do so to contribute to a robust next round of the Programme.
The Board will present its full report to the Conference of the Parties at its third meeting in November 2019.
On behalf of the Board we would also like to thank the Secretariat of the Global Environment Facility for hosting the meeting at its premises in Washington D.C.
Sam Adu-Kumi (Ghana) and Reggie Hernaus (The Netherlands
Co-Chairs of the Governing Board of the Specific International Programme
Washington D.C., 20 September 2019