European Sustainable Energy Cluster partnership for Africa: ESECA

Programme(s): Programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises-COSME

Topic(s): CLUSINT-01-2020

Call: COS-CLUSINT-2020-3-01-1

Type of action: Grant agreement

Project ID: 101035882

Objective

European Sustainable Energy Cluster partnership for Africa (ESECA) is a partnership formed by five European clusters (ACE, MEDEE, LE2C, MetaIndustry4 and ECPE) from Spain, France, Italy and Germany, which its main objective is to intensify business network collaboration among European SMEs in the renewable energy and smart grids sectors, in order to develop a joint internationalisation strategy with common goals towards Sub-Sahara African markets and an implementation roadmap facilitating the internationalisation of these SMEs. More than 500 organisations and around 300 SMEs will be benefitted from this project. The main goal of ESECA partnership is further developed into three specific objectives: 1. To strengthen the collaboration among European clusters and SMEs in the renewable energy and smart grids sector to dive into Sub-Sahara African markets. 2. To foster the internationalisation of European SMEs into Sub-Sahara African countries to promote the implantation of renewable energy and smart grid systems. 3. To create a strong cluster partnership and assure the long-term sustainability of ESECA partnership. These objectives will be achieved by the following key actions: 1. Organisation of three networking events in Europe to foster SMEs and cluster collaboration. 2. Development of market reports and intelligence gathering in four exploratory trips to target countries. 3. Organisation of four direct missions to target countries based on the internationalisation strategy plan. 4. Signature of cooperation agreements and business agreements with key stakeholders in the target countries. 5. Development and signature of a Partnership Agreement and a long -term sustainability strategy. In total, it is expected that ESECA partnership organises 13 events during the project, signs 4 cooperation agreements, the SMEs sign 12 business agreements and that the SMEs benefitted from the project increase their turnover and employment in international activities a 10%.