In Colombia, International Development Cooperation is experiencing a moment of transition, new scenarios, challenges, and new development actors, where the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the central axis, and against which new financing mechanisms should be sought to improve the effectiveness of cooperation. To meet these challenges and achieve sustainable and equitable development, States and international organizations have found themselves in need of working together with other actors, including the private sector, to implement new development strategies both nationally and internationally. Colombia is no stranger to this new reality. Colombia is a High Middle-Income country that has already joined the OECD; and in this sense, we must rethink our partnership schemes and have an open and flexible look to welcome new development actors that complement national efforts and priorities and guide their work towards the consolidation of installed and sustainable capacities, while strengthening the modalities of South-South and Triangular cooperation.
This panorama offers the possibility of consolidating Colombia’s leadership in the development of new instruments, tools and methodological contributions that make the country a technical and methodological reference, which promotes South-South Cooperation of excellence, and that adds value to the implemented initiatives. With this perspective, the National Strategy for International Cooperation (NSIC) 2019-2022 has been developed, which aims to respond to the changes that are occurring day by day in International Development Cooperation, and provide guidelines for the articulation between entities, capacity building and enforcement of international cooperation regulations.
This National Strategy for International Cooperation (NSIC) 2019-2022, was jointly built by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), the National Planning Department (NPD) and the Presidential Agency for International Cooperation of Colombia (PAIC-Colombia). The preparation exercise began at the end of 2018 with the development of technical tables in which 58 entities of the national level participated, those entities presented their main demands and offers of cooperation for the four-year period. At the beginning of 2019, most of the country’s departments were visited and inputs from 51 local authorities were collected. In total, 560 demand lines and 350 good practices for cooperation offer were identified, which are presented in the annexes to this document. In addition to inquiring about their cooperation priorities, with the territories an analysis was made on the dynamics of the relationship between cooperators, executing partners and public entities, which allowed a diagnosis of successes, problems and challenges in the management and coordination of international cooperation at the local level, which was highly important to this document.