Bilateral research cooperation South Africa

The FWO is keen on promoting international collaboration as a driving force for excellence. That is why the FWO signs bilateral agreements with a number of countries/regions to fund joint research projects. These projects go further than the traditional mobility projects, because personnel and consumables as well as equipment can also be financed.

One of the selected countries/regions is South Africa. The FWO has reached an agreement with the South African funder National Research Foundation (NRF) on the funding of fundamental research in all domains.

• Carefully read the guidelines for applicants, verify if there are no restrictions in place regarding international cooperation in FWO funding instruments, and start working on your application (both at FWO and NRF) in time.
• Your joint application is submitted before the deadline both at FWO (by using the online application form in the FWO E-portal) and at NRF according to their modalities. Please note that each online FWO submission is automatically confirmed by a confirmation email. If you did not receive such an email, please verify whether you properly submitted your application.
• Specific points of attention FWO application:
• The Flemish supervisor-spokesperson needs to upload for each of each involved Flemish and South African (co-)supervisor(-spokesperson) a CV that is structured according to the FWO CV template to the FWO application.
• Each Flemish and South African ((co-)supervisor(-spokesperson)should register at FWO by creating an online profile including an overview of academic positions and an updated list of publications on the FWO E-portal before the submission deadline. Please note that the registration of your login/password takes 24 hours. It is therefore strongly advised to start well in advance.
• The online FWO application form contains a specific tab 'Research Security'. Applicants are required, based on the topic of their research proposal, involved countries and foreign partners, to complete a set of questions regarding unwanted knowledge transfer, misuse of research results and/or interference. If as a result of this, your project proposal needs a research security approval, please contact the dedicated contact persons at your host institution immediately, preferably before the submission of your proposal. A presentation on this subject can be consulted here.
• NEW: From this call onwards, you will find an additional question in the application form about the ‘substantive and/or conceptual contribution’ that the applicant(s) and possibly others have made to the research design and, where applicable, to the associated data collection and analysis and/or interpretation thereof. This concerns information that allows the evaluators to better understand the genesis of the research proposal. Sometimes questions are raised about the extent to which an applicant for a project or mandate has developed the proposal themselves or has (re)used existing ideas from other proposals. It is also a matter of ethics to acknowledge those who have contributed ideas and data, whether as co-applicants, researchers not involved in the application, or in any other capacity. However, this new section in the forms is not intended as a new criterion for scoring the application
• FWO and NRF perform an eligibility check to verify if your application meets all formal criteria of respectively FWO and NRF.
• FWO and NRF will send out the proposal submitted at respectively FWO and NRF out for external peer review according to the respective regulations for peer review. More information on the FWO modalities can be in the FWO regulations internal and external peer review.
• An ad hoc joint interdisciplinary selection committee composed of Flemish and South African experts makes a final ranking. This panel is composed after the call deadline based on the applications that were submitted.
• The Board of Trustees of FWO and NRF take the final decision.
• At the end of the evaluation procedure you will receive feedback on your application.