Europe to Establish Presence in Five Countries to Strengthen Cooperation on ICT Standardization.
Building on the proven success of projects SESEC and SESEI, the European Commission (DG INTPA lead with participation of DG GROW and DG CONNECT) together with CEN, CENELEC and ETSI are launching a project named GIST (Global Partnerships for Human-Centric Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Standardization).
Over a 48-month period ending in December 2028, the GIST project will seek to:
- Strengthen long-term relationships between European Union (EU) standard-setting bodies and relevant standardization and regulatory bodies in selected partner countries and regions.
- Promote EU digital standards and international digital standards aligned with EU values with green, gender responsive and human centric perspectives in each target country.
The targeted geographies are:
- Indonesia (base location) and the Philippines
- Kenya
- Nigeria
- Egypt (base location) and Tunisia
- Colombia
with also some activities at regional level around the base country.
The above objectives will be reached through the establishment of an expert and an office in each of the five targeted geographies allowing the Partners to raise awareness of the European standardization system as well as to receive structured and focused information in Europe on the policy, regulatory and standardization landscape for Digital in the targeted geographies.
The deployment of experts on the ground will allow the Partners to establish or strengthen a consistent and durable relationship with local stakeholders. The presence of a team on-site will notably enable the Partners to anticipate developments requiring a reaction and to prepare such reaction based on a solid local network that will progressively be built in the context of the project.
Please note that these renewed open calls for tender are now launched for Candidates to apply for the GIST Expert positions as well as for the provision of support services (mainly office and local project assistant) in Indonesia and in Egypt. Positions for Colombia, Kenya and Nigeria have already been filled. Please also note that due to the difficulty in finding applicants for Tunisia as well as for increased regional impact and better synergies with existing initiatives, Egypt is now considered the base country in the Egypt/Tunisia duo.
Applicants should follow the instructions provided in the annexed calls for tender. Only applications including all the requested information will be considered.
ETSI will be the lead for Indonesia (and the Philippines) as well as for Egypt (and Tunisia).
CEN will be the lead for Kenya, Nigeria and Colombia. CEN also acts as project coordinator for GIST.
The deadline for the submission of applications is 24 August 2025 end of day, and applications should be sent to xavier.piednoir@etsi.org and copied to policy@etsi.org.
Short-listed candidates will be interviewed by a committee composed by representatives of the Project Partners ETSI, CEN, CENELEC and the European Commission. Full details about the calls can be found in the Annexes to the present collective letter.
Annexes are available from the ETSI website:
