The PONCHO Consortium is composed of 4 European Union (EU) universities from 4 different EU countries (Spain, France, Portugal and Poland) and 21 universities from 8 Latin America (LA) countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay). The specificity and innovative aspects of the PONCHO Consortium is that it is mainly composed by small universities, geographically located in peripheral areas and with no or a few experience in EU and Capacity Building projects (Alfa projects) for the Latin American partners.

Nevertheless, in the Consortium have been included several regional institutions which have a consolidated experience in the implementation of EU Projects. The participation of these Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the Consortium is highly valued in order to foster the exchange of good practices from the more experienced partners to the not so experienced ones, both for a EU-LA cooperation and LA-LA cooperation approaches.

All the partners will be involved in all the activities and the coordination of each Work Package (WP) will be shared between a coordinator and a joint coordinator institution (EU+LA coordination team or LA+LA coordination team) according to partners’ expertise. At least one HEIs of each partner country will participate in the coordination or joint coordination of the project in order to empower these institutions in the execution of structural parts of international projects (preparation, situation report, quality plan, dissemination and exploitation).