Baku, Azerbaijan, Aug. 20
By Huseyn Valiyev – Trend:
The project proposals of the consortia participating in the tender of the European Commission to receive funding within the EU4Digital program are in the interests of Azerbaijan, Tofig Babayev, director of Azerbaijan’s Regional Information Technologies Academy (RITA), told Trend.
Babayev added that EU4Digital includes six areas, namely, e-customs, e-commerce, e-business, e-security, e-health and e-trade.
"The European Commission has announced a tender worth 11 million euros, which involves three consortia, each of which includes about six organizations,” he said. “The winners will be selected in two stages. Till August 29, tender participants must submit their preliminary proposals. I think they will be considered by the European Commission within the next month, after which the winner will be disclosed."
“The European Commission sent preliminary technical terms to the bidders, listing the main tasks for the abovementioned six areas of the EU4Digital,” Babayev added. “These are basically the tasks that the Eastern Partnership countries discussed during their meetings for the last two years.”
"Consortia will have to voice opinions regarding the way of their implementation of the proposals of the Eastern Partnership countries agreed with the European Commission," he said. “The winner of the tender in the second stage will have to submit detailed proposals on the technical tasks by the end of the year. The consortium which will win the tender will negotiate with us. In general, all the proposals to be submitted on six areas are in the interests of Azerbaijan and we will cooperate with them."
The EU4Digital program is supervised by the Ministry of Transport, Communications and High Technologies of Azerbaijan. The ministry together with the European Commission is implementing a project on e-commerce and legal regulation in this area.
"The first Baku e-trade forum - 2018 will be held in Baku on September 24-25,” Babayev said. “Within the preparation for the forum, an organizing committee has been set up to discuss the program of the event.”
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