Strategic Partnership · Bilateral Development Cooperation
AICS, one platform to run bilateral development across 40+ priority countries
Italy’s Agency for Development Cooperation runs one of Europe’s largest bilateral cooperation footprints—20 field offices, 40+ priority countries, an extensive network of implementing partners. The partnership with Gohorto turns that footprint into a coordinated operating system.
AICS: turning Italian cooperation policy into programs in priority countries
The Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS) implements Italy’s development cooperation policy on the ground—working under the political direction of MAECI to deliver bilateral programs in 40+ priority countries across Mediterranean Africa, East/West/Southern Africa, the Middle East, the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
AICS operates through 20 field offices regionally organized across Africa and Asia, with each office managing programs across multiple partner countries through thematic units in infrastructure, rural development, health, women’s empowerment, civil society support, and emergency response.
- Implement Italy’s development cooperation policy
- Manage bilateral programs and grants in priority countries
- Coordinate Italian NGO partners and implementers
- Deliver emergency and humanitarian response
- 20 field offices regionally organized
- 40+ priority cooperation countries
- Thematic units across infrastructure, health, gender, civil society
- Embedded coordination with Italian embassies
- Mediterranean Africa: Egypt, Libya, Tunisia
- Middle East: Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria
- Eastern/Western/Southern Africa (Eritrea→Mozambique)
- Eastern Europe: Armenia, Moldova, Ukraine
- Western Balkans (Albania), Asia, Latin America
- Italian NGOs (WeWorld, COSV, others)
- Italian universities and research institutions
- Private sector (e.g., Eni — Letters of Intent)
- Multilateral partners (UN, EU, World Bank)
A strategic partnership built for Italian cooperation in the field
AICS is where Italian cooperation policy meets execution. With 20 field offices across Africa, the Middle East, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America—and a partner ecosystem spanning Italian NGOs, universities, the private sector, and multilateral institutions—the agency sits at the center of one of Europe’s most extensive bilateral cooperation systems.
Gohorto provides the operating layer that turns that distributed footprint into a coordinated agency: shared workflows for grants, partners, programs, and outcomes—deployed consistently across every country and every sector.
Why coordinating bilateral cooperation at scale is hard
- 1Multi-country, multi-sector portfoliosEach AICS field office runs programs in multiple sectors—infrastructure, health, gender, education, agriculture, civil society—often across multiple partner countries from a single regional hub.
- 2Many implementing partners per programItalian NGOs (WeWorld and dozens of others), universities, private-sector implementers, and multilateral agencies all participate in AICS-funded programs—each with its own reporting and operating style.
- 3Donor and oversight complexityAICS-funded programs feed into Italian Parliament reporting, OECD-DAC, EU joint programming, and country-level reporting cycles. Each requires clean, traceable outcome data.
- 4Cooperation in fragile and post-conflict contextsMany priority countries (Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Ukraine, Somalia) require operational rigor in environments where infrastructure cannot be assumed.
How Gohorto powers the partnership (capabilities)
20 field offices run their portfolios in shared workflows—country-specific configuration, but unified reporting at the AICS HQ level.
AICS calls for proposals (NGO, university, private-sector) are managed end-to-end—submission, evaluation, contracting, milestones, and final reporting.
Italian NGOs, universities, and other partners are tracked across past, current, and pipeline programs—building institutional memory that survives staff rotation.
Infrastructure, health, gender, agriculture, civil society programs all run in the same system—each with its own indicators, all rolling up to portfolio-level KPIs.
Humanitarian programs use the same platform as long-term cooperation—keeping crisis and development data in one operating picture.
OECD-DAC, EU, and Italian Parliament reporting are produced from the same underlying data—turning a manual reporting cycle into an automated one.
These figures only stay coherent because the underlying operating layer treats every country, every program, and every partner as part of one institutional portfolio.
Where the partnership goes next
As AICS expands its footprint under the new Three-Year Programming and Policy Planning Document and the Mattei Plan for Africa, the partnership with Gohorto provides a repeatable foundation: program templates, partner directories, sector indicators, and reporting frameworks that can be cloned and adapted to new countries and new initiatives without rebuilding from scratch.
See how this looks for your program
We’ll map Gohorto to your workflow and show the exact operating model your team would run.