The Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Roscongress Foundation are conducting a BRICS Solutions Awards contest of best solutions and practices in a wide range of spheres. The 2020 contest will be held under the auspices of the Russian BRICS Chairmanship and supported by the BRICS Business Council.
The goal is to choose the best ideas and socioeconomic practices aimed at improving the quality of life and living standards and to subsequently implement them in the BRICS countries. The projects submitted to the BRICS Solution Awards will be accumulated in an open-access databank of best practices and solutions in various spheres of socioeconomic development and their implementation to be given broad international information support.
In light of the importance of combating the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and overcoming its negative consequences, the 2020 programme of the contest includes 7 categories:
- Public health and healthy living;
- Quality of life and demography;
- Innovations and technology;
- Green economy;
- Business solutions;
- Housing and urban development;
- Education.
“The BRICS group is seen, with good reason, as a global center of the future scientific and technological development. Launching a project of this kind in the current difficult circumstances is a proof of the BRICS countries’ openness to broad international partnership in the vital sphere of finding effective joint answers to modern challenges,” noted Anton Kobyakov, Executive Secretary of the organising committee for preparing and providing for Russia’s SCO Chairmanship in 2019-2020 and BRICS Chairmanship in 2020.
“The Agency for Strategic Initiatives has considerable experience in organizing best practices contests in Russia, which are an effective instrument for sharing experience, including between Russian regions,” Svetlana Chupsheva, ASI General Director, pointed out. “Holding this contest within the BRICS framework will launch an official and yet informal exchange of promising ideas among our countries. The contest will become a simple and straightforward mechanism for promoting best practices in the BRICS countries, which all of the group’s countries need because they will face increasingly more complicated challenges.”
Sergei Katyrin, President of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said he shared the view on the importance and relevance of the project: “This initiative can become a regular form of international cooperation and a way for the BRICS countries to show the world that they are open for partnership and ready to look for effective solutions to common challenges, which is especially relevant in light of the new global challenges.”
The BRICS Solutions Awards contest is to be launched at a news conference scheduled for 14 October 2020, at 2 pm in the TASS News Agency.
An international jury will choose three finalists and one winner in each category.
More information and the terms of the contest are available on its official website https://brics.asi.ru/