Central Baltic companies seek collaboration opportunities in the humanitarian field

As part of the Interreg Central Baltic programme, the INGOs project took companies from Estonia, Finland, Latvia and Sweden on a business visit to Geneva to explore opportunities for cooperation and participation in international organisations’ procurement and pilot initiatives.

During the visit, participants discussed how to strengthen public–private cooperation in the fields of humanitarian aid and development cooperation. Particular attention was given to how piloting – testing new solutions on a smaller scale – could help international organisations evaluate and adopt innovative private-sector products and services more quickly.

At the seminar held within the framework of the INGOs project, Mariin Ratnik, Deputy Minister for Economic and Development Affairs, delivered a keynote address. She emphasised that collaboration between the public and private sectors is crucial in humanitarian aid and crisis response, highlighting several strong examples of Estonian-Ukrainian cooperation. According to her, companies should be more open to offering innovative solutions even in fields for which they were not originally developed. Often, technology or services created for entirely different sectors can prove highly valuable in crisis situations.

Several international organisations took part in the seminar and subsequent roundtable discussions, including CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), the World Food Programme, UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency), UN Women, IOM (International Organization for Migration), and the International Trade Centre, to explore potential cooperation opportunities with companies from the Central Baltic region.

Project partners also participated in the AidEx exhibition – one of the world’s largest humanitarian-sector events. Held from 22–23 October, the exhibition showcased small and medium-sized enterprises’ solutions that could support humanitarian and development cooperation activities.

The visit also included a tour of CERN, where participants were introduced to procurement-related opportunities and the services of CERN’s Knowledge Transfer Centre, which helps bring research and development outcomes into practical applications.

Participants also attended a networking reception organised by the UN missions of eight countries (Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland). The reception provided a valuable opportunity to build new connections and discuss how companies in the region could contribute more actively to international organisations’ projects and collaboration efforts.

The aim of the visit was to strengthen links between companies in the Central Baltic region and international organisations, and to support the adoption of innovative solutions in the fields of humanitarian aid and development cooperation. Project partners are now planning follow-up webinars and cooperation meetings to deepen contacts made during the visit and open new opportunities for collaboration.

The project partners are Business Tampere (lead partner), the Latvian IT Cluster, RISE Research Institute of Sweden, and the Tehnopol Science and Business Park. The INGOs project runs until September 2026 and is co-funded by the Interreg Central Baltic programme.

More information available at this link!