EU Delegation promotes the new IPA regional projects

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EU Delegation promotes the new IPA regional projects

Friday, 16 April 2010 16:14

In his opening address, Mr. Patrick Paquet (Head of Political and Information Section – Delegation of the EU) emphasized that civil society is a very important integrative factor and that it can be an important motor for social capital formation as part of the EU accession process.

Mr. Paquet presented the support instruments in the Western Balkans region and in Turkey: IPA 2008-2010, project TASCO for technical support of the civil society, as well as the program “People to People”.

While presenting the 14 organizations from Macedonia that are part of the current IPA grant scheme in the areas of environment and working environment protection, fight against crime, corruption and human trafficking, Mr. Paquet stressed that there is “an excellent trend of growing capacity of civil society organizations in the country” if we take into consideration that out of a total of 25 projects in the region, 4 are run by organizations from Macedonia, and 10 organizations are project partners.

The four leading organizations from Macedonia were presented:

Furthermore, the national grant scheme to be managed by the EU Delegation with the participation of a body of the Macedonian Government will be announced in June, in order to strengthen their capacity for administration of these funds in the future. Mr. Paquet emphasized; “The implementation of these calls and projects is a learning exercise not only for the civil society organizations, but for the authorities as well, in “organizing transparent and robust evaluation procedures, based on strict criteria, in order to establish best practice - so when the scheme is run by the authorities it is run at the highest level."
Mr. Paquet elaborated on the process of preparing and submitting a Progress report to the EU, inviting the civil society organizations to contribute by providing the Delegation with information on issues that are of interest to them.

Ms. Irena Ivanova (EU delegation) made a presentation on the EU funds that will soon be available from various programs, such as the Civil Society Assistance programs, the programs for cross-border cooperation with neighbouring countries, and the already established programs in Bulgaria and Albania, as well as the new one in Greece. She also noted that the high participation rate of Macedonian organizations in the regional projects “indicates an enormous growth in quality of the civil society sector”.

Lastly, Ms. Ivanova and Ms. Panoreja Desovska (EU Delegation) presented the new EIDHR call for proposals, explaining in detail the requirements and method of implementation of the decision making process and performance of activities in terms of content and from an administrative-financial aspect.

This year’s novelty in the area of co-financing is that instead of a minimum of 20%, the EU now requires a minimum participation of 5% from the applicants and the amount of the budget that can be obtained from EIDHR ranges from 50 to 90 thousand euros. The deadline for submission of a concept note for this call is May 19, 2010.

Tags: BEWMAN , IPA , EU