Colombia

<p>This project will enhance ITC offerings of global public goods &nbsp; by advancing the development of additional functionalities within the Deforestation-Free Trade Gateway (DFTG) whose development has recently started in March 2024 under the ITC project C374. The DFTG aims to mitigate the potential impact of the new European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) on trade flows between Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the European Union, particularly for economic operators involved in the production and trade of the commodities covered by the Regulation.</p><p>The project will enhance and simplify the utilization of the Producers registry by introducing an invitation mechanism. This mechanism will enable EU operators and exporters to collect and compile the farm-level information from their suppliers through the DFTG, facilitating the substantiation of their Due Diligence (DD) statements. Furthermore, EU operators and LAC exporters will be able to issue a DD self-statement document with the information they gathered through the invitation mechanism.</p><p>The new functionalities under development will undergo testing within the same value chain and pilot countries as the Producers&apos; registry.&nbsp;</p>

<p>The Youth Startup Academy Colombia project, financed by the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency (KOSME), aims to incubate 800 young entrepreneurs in vulnerable regions of Colombia and to support 100 high impact technology based startups in Bogota and Medellin by 2026. To fulfil this goal, the project will adapt and implement the Korean Youth Startup Academy programme, the most successful Korean startup incubation and acceleration programme. The project will partner with various local institutions, including iNNpulsa, the government agency mandated to coordinate all startup entrepreneurship activities in Colombia. Throughout the project term(March 2024~December 2026), the project will run 4 intakes of entrepreneurs, and will provide training, mentoring and consulting services. For the implementation, the project will partner with the Government of Colombia (i.e. Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Tourism), the Korean Government (Ministry of SME and Startups, KOSME) and various agents in the Korean and Colombian startup ecosystem.</p>

<p>This project will enhance ITC offerings of global public goods through the development of a tool, the Deforestation-Free Trade Gateway (DFTG), aimed to mitigate the potential impact of the new European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) on trade flows between Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the European Union, particularly for economic operators involved in the production and trade of the commodities covered by the Regulation.&nbsp;</p><p>The project will develop a functionality, the Deforestation-Free-Trade Producer Registry, for value chain operators in both European and Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries to gather evidence that the products they trade do not originate from deforested or forest degraded areas. Thus, &nbsp;the Deforestation-Free Producer Registry will gather the farm-level information that the EU operators need for issuing their Due Diligence Statement.</p>