Human-centred” has become one of the most common phrases in digital cooperation policy. It appears in summit declarations, funding calls, cooperation agreements, and project descriptions across the EU-LAC space. Both regions have made it a stated commitment.
But stating a commitment and designing for it are two different things.
When the SPIDER project mapped over 100 digital cooperation agreements between the European Union and Latin America and the Caribbean, we found that human-centred principles — inclusion, equity, transparency, user agency — were present in the language of almost every instrument we reviewed. What was rarely present was any mechanism to ensure those principles shaped how systems were actually built, who was at the table when decisions were made, or whether the people the technology was meant to serve ever had a meaningful say.
This is the problem our latest output addresses head-on.
The Guidelines for Human-Centred and Sustainable Cooperation on Digital Transformation start from a simple premise: if inclusion is not a design requirement, it will always arrive too late. When DEI criteria are added after research questions are set, partnerships are formed, and governance structures are decided, they can patch problems but not prevent them. The same is true for ethical AI principles, for accessibility standards, and for the cultural and linguistic contexts that determine whether a digital system actually works for the communities it claims to serve.
Who is still not in the room
Our survey of 357 stakeholders across Europe and LAC, combined with the analysis of EU Framework Programme participation data, pointed to a consistent pattern. Five countries — Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia — account for the vast majority of LAC engagement in EU-funded research and innovation. Caribbean nations and smaller economies are nearly absent. On the European side, participation is more diversified. On the LAC side, it is concentrated among already-capable institutions, with limited space for the actors closest to the communities that digital transformation is meant to benefit.
This is not inevitable. It is the result of design choices — in funding instruments, in administrative requirements, in how partnerships are formed and sustained — that can be made differently.
What the guidelines propose
The nine guidelines we are publishing are built around the conviction that human-centred cooperation is not a values statement. It is an operational requirement that needs to be embedded from the earliest stages of any initiative — in how it is designed, funded, governed, monitored, and evaluated.
This means DEI audits as governance tools, not compliance exercises. It means funding conditionality tied to equity outcomes. It means AI systems developed within EU-LAC frameworks that are trained on data reflecting LAC languages, cultures, and social realities — not translated from contexts that don’t apply. And it means diverse leadership in technical and decision-making roles, not just in consultation processes.
It also means honest monitoring. Not counting meetings or publications, but asking whether cooperation actually changed something — for institutions, for communities, for the people who will live with the digital systems being built.
Built with, not for
These guidelines were co-created with partners across Europe and Latin America through workshops, working groups, twinning partnerships, and structured multi-stakeholder dialogues. That process is itself part of the argument: cooperation that doesn’t involve the people it affects from the beginning is unlikely to serve them well at the end.
We are sharing them as a practical framework and an open invitation — to policymakers, researchers, civil society organisations, NRENs, and innovation communities across both regions — to use them, challenge them, and build on them.
Read the full guidelines
If you work in digital policy, research, civil society, or innovation across the EU-LAC space — these guidelines were built with you in mind, and with many of you directly involved.
They are not a final answer. They are a practical framework for asking better questions: about who is at the table, how commitments are structured, what gets measured, and whether the systems being built actually serve the communities they are meant to reach.
The full document includes nine guidelines, concrete implementation actions, and the evidence base behind each recommendation.
