Forging partnerships, mastering global challenges

For more than 30 years, the Robert Bosch Stiftung has actively pursued projects and programs as part of a transatlantic exchange. In the interest of intercultural understanding, we promote the open and trustful dialog between Germany/Europe and the USA as a key partner, with the aim of mastering global challenges together. To this end, we create platforms and networks to bring together policy makers, citizens, and opinion leaders willing to partner up and shape the change in the different societies.

Since 1984, we have invited more than 540 young, future American leaders from the U.S. to spend a year in Germany. In cooperation with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, we established a number of formats together with the U.S. Congress and its German counterpart, the Bundestag, in 2003 that help German and American representatives to meet and collaborate. Further steps in pursuing our goal of improving the understanding between the USA and Germany/Europe are our partnerships with U.S. think tanks, universities, and NGOs, as well as closely involving the USA in trilateral and multilateral formats.

Connecting people, generating coherence

Since the foundation of the Robert Bosch Stiftung, Europe has been a core region. For several decades, our activities in support of intercultural understanding primarily focused on Germany’s relationships with its neighbors France and Poland. Today, the regional scope of our European engagement extends beyond the neighboring countries, and often beyond the borders of the European Union as well. One of our key objectives is to make Europe and the cooperation among European nations tangible in the everyday life of as many people as possible. Coherence in Europe is heavily dependent on people’s ability to see a connection to their personal life. This is why we support, among others, projects that connect representatives of civil society in European forums or major programs that bring together delegates of local initiatives from different European cities, giving them an opportunity to exchange their experiences and establish shared learning.

The international cultural exchange projects we support are a step toward reaching a more differentiated idea of other European cultures. However, as these projects cannot replace the personal experience of visiting another country, we also advocate for making an international exchange the norm among young Germans and Europeans. Despite considerable progress, Europe continues to be marked by major current or past conflicts. That is why we promote understanding and reconciliation in regions like the South Caucasus and the Balkans, by offering a way to work through the specific conflicts. In addition, we support activities that can help end the armed conflict in Ukraine.

Beyond our engagement in promoting intercultural understanding, we utilize European cooperation to establish an exchange of best practices and expertise, and to publicize findings, for instance via Europe-wide continuous learning offerings for healthcare specialists and executives, or by participating in European networks on matters of migration and integration.

Overcoming conflicts, promoting understanding

The Robert Bosch Stiftung has been active in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) since 2006. In this region, our activities are geared at, firstly, promoting a better understanding between Europe and the Arab world and, secondly, at resolving and overcoming the numerous prevailing conflicts and contributing to a positive development of the region. To promote mutual understanding, we have established international cultural exchange projects, such as the Film Prize for young emerging talents from Germany and the Arab world, as well as dialog and collaboration formats with a focus on urban development, social entrepreneurship, and the advancement of women. Besides the cultural exchange, which spans the entire region, our activities focus on three Maghreb countries, namely Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria.

The Foundation is also committed to the causes of conflict transformation and peacemaking in the MENA region. As it is geographically so close to the European continent, this region is of particular importance, having great potential, yet with some nations also going through fragile transition processes and experiencing domestic and cross-national conflicts. Consequently, preventing and deescalating armed conflicts in the region, for instance by offering mediation, is another top priority of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.

Supporting excellence in science, providing access to education

Africa has taken a more prominent role in our activities over the past few years: Our commitment on the continent started in 2006, with a focus on Northern Africa where we support collaborative projects of European participants and their direct neighbors on the other side of the Mediterranean. These include, among others, joint cultural projects or activities in the fields of urban development and social entrepreneurship. We have also been expanding our commitment to sub-Saharan Africa since 2013.

Offering projects in science, education, and intercultural understanding, we focus on Africa’s great potential without ignoring the challenges involved: We promote excellent African scientists, giving them greater international visibility. However, giving an increasing number of young people access to quality education remains a key challenge for the educational systems of the African nations. We support the decision-makers in addressing and managing this challenge. As regards intercultural understanding, our vision is to change the mutual perception between Africa and Europe as well as to support Africans in engineering a sustainable social change.

Our contribution to building the foundations of this development is our support for projects that aim to overcome existing conflicts and prevent new ones, as well as to augment the visibility of key players from Africa in international forums.

Strengthening the dialog, creating the change

It would be a fatal error to underestimate the global importance of Asia: On top of its sheer number of people and impressive economic prowess, Asia’s fast pace in change processes offers significant potential for economies, societies, and regional development. Active in the region since 2006, the Robert Bosch Stiftung aims at intensifying the dialog between Asia on the one hand and Germany and Europe on the other, as well as the dialog among Asian countries. We also strive to assist advocates in partnering up and actively shaping their changing societies. The idea is not just to "understand" Asia but also to enter into an active exchange with representatives of the region. Alongside this, our goal is to give Asia more visibility in multilateral forums, as would be appropriate considering the region’s globally unrivaled economic, political, and social dynamics. The particular key regions of our activities are East Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. In East Asia, our priorities are China, Japan, and Korea; in Southeast Asia, Indonesia and Vietnam for the time being; in South Asia, primarily India as a future global powerhouse.

The political, economic, and social diversity on the Asian continent also leads to a variety of domestic and cross-national tensions and conflicts. An increasing number of emerging countries in Asia have stepped up their regional and global involvement, but often enough, past conflicts within or between societies have not received adequate public recognition. Other challenges include the so far poor efficiency of multicultural regional conflict management mechanisms as well as the varying developmental states of influential civil societies that could play a role in preventing future conflicts. This is why we promote activities in Asia too that shift the focus to topics such as truth, justice, remembrance, conflict prevention, and mediation.