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 On February 21st, 2008 Information seminar aimed at launching the European Commission program ‘Non-state actors and local authorities in development: program for Belarus’ took place in Minsk. The event was organized in Minsk International Education Center and gathered more than 130 participants.
The key goal of this event was to raise awareness and improve understanding of the project's target group (Belarusian NGOs and local authorities) about the EC donor assistance to Belarus in the field of civil society development, in specific the EC thematic programs for Belarus.
The most actual information was provided by the team of representatives from Delegation of the European Commission to Ukraine and Belarus. Mr. Jean-Eric Holzapfel, Chargé d'affaires for Belarus, has stressed the interest of European Commission to see more well-developed project applications from Belarus. Ms. Svitlana Didkivska has presented an overview of the European Commission's worldwide thematic programs. Presentation of the call for proposals concerning Belarus under the thematic program "Non-state actors and local authorities in development" (NSA-LA) was provided by Mr. Volodymyr Kondrachuk. It is possible to find strategy paper related to this program at the webpage.
Representative of National Coordination Unit Mr. Leonid Orlov also stressed the importance of using new opportunities of implementing projects under EU support and appealed participants to be creative and professional both at planning and implementation phase.
The participants were extremely interested in getting detailed information about the global thematic programs of the European Commission in general and in specific the county programs for Belarus one of announced is NSA & LA program.
For organizers of Information session-seminar it was also quite important to promote some activities and services of the EC measure in 2008. It was done by the leader of measure activities Ms. Lene Petersen.
In the afternoon there was an open floor for participants of this event to give some feedback on information received in the first half of the day. The main discussion was organized around 2 key questions:
- Are the priorities mentioned in the new NSA-LA program relevant enough to Belarus and Belarusian organization?
- In what spheres of activities it is mostly important to provide interaction between local authorities and non-state actors?
Participants stated in general that the program priorities are good and appropriate as well as interactions between NGOs and LA are necessary, otherwise nothing could be solved. It is necessary to acquaint local authorities with the foreign experience and facilitate cross-sector cooperation. It is necessary to train people to use the main available tools of interaction. At the same time participants stressed several times that there is a big gap and lack of communication and understanding between NGOs and authorities.
To conclude the results of this information session-seminar it is necessary to admit that most of participants found information about EU programs useful and practical. A lot of participants paid attention at the situation when project implementation is hardly possible or extremely late because of long and tiring registration procedure provided by Belarusian authorities.
EC representatives stressed their interest to feedback from Belarusian participants to make future programs even more appropriate to needs of organizations.
Additional information
Prepared by Ulad Vialichka
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