Five steps towards 10m EUR for Development Education - 47 concept notes submitted

Information provided by Petra Kreinecker, TRIALOG
Source: TRIALOG Information Service (02/04/2007)

As soon as it became clear that lobby actions accross the EU were successfull and the EC announced to allocate 10m EUR especially for development education and awareness raising activities in the new EU member states (NMS), NGOs started to prepare for this EC Call 2006 of the budget line 21 02 03.

The first step: The Development Education Partnership Fair in October 2006 organised by TRIALOG in cooperation with CONCORD brought together 200 NGO representatives and offered a space for them to find potential project partners from old and/or new EU member states, to start building consortia and consider to participate in the EC Call as “consortium members”, “European partners” or “associates”. As a result, 21 pre-agreements for common projects were signed at the Fair in Vienna by numerous participating NGOs.

The second step: As follow up of the Fair, ten “project-oriented” trainings with more than 150 participants from all NMS (incl. Romania and Bulgaria) have been organized by TRIALOG between November 2006 and Januar 2007 in different countries. During these trainings the number of eleborated joint NGO project proposals rose to around 40.

The third step: In February 2007, the NGOs submitted their concept notes to the EC within the 1st stage of this 2stage Call for Proposals in Development Education published by the EC in 2006. TRIALOG collected data on the submitted concept notes. The received questionnaires show a strong participation of NMS NGOs: At least 47 concept notes have been submitted for the Call for Proposal 2006 with the active participation of the 10 NMS and the 2 (in 2006) Accession Countries (AC) Bulgaria and Romania. 21 organizations from Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia presented projects as lead agency; 44 organizations from all 10 NMS are Consortium Members and 57 NMS-NGOs participated as European Partners. There was also considerable participation from Bulgarian and Romanian NGOs: 11 projects with the participation of 14 AC NGOs were submitted to the EC in Brussels by the deadline of February 20. In total, 136 NMS organizations were mentioned in an active role in the submitted project proposals.

Preparing the fourth step: It is expected that the EC will take the decision on the concept notes around April 20. As soon as more details will be known, the information will be circulated. In the meanwhile, TRIALOG is planning the next step in preparation of the 2nd stage of the application process. TRIALOG is offering further support for the project teams to elaborate their final application forms. If your organization or project team is interested in a respective training - please reserve already the following dates as probable training dates: Monday, 23rd – Tuesday, 24th of April; Thursday, 10th – Friday, 11th of May and Tuesday, 22nd – Wednesday, 23rd of May. In case the EC will publish its decision later than expected, we will inform you about the new training dates as soon as possible. TRIALOG hopes that a lot of NMS NGOs will receive an invitation to present a full project proposal within this second stage of the Call for Proposals.

It's a long way towards an EC financed project. However, the fifth and last step - the start and implementation of the finally approved projects - could then break new grounds for the awareness of development issues in Europe…

In the 2006 PVD Call (actions in developing countries), according to information received from NGOs by TRIALOG, at least 11 projects were submitted by Czech, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish and Slovak organizations within the January deadline.

For further statistical analysis of the collected information on submitted concept notes in the 2006 EC calls in ED and PVD, please see the following TRIALOG excel sheet: http://www.trialog.or.at/docs/statistics_conceptnotes.xls

For the results of the previous 2005 ED and PVD calls of the NGO co-financing budget line 21 02 03 turn to the EuropeAid website:
PVD: http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/tender/data/d32/AOF75232.htm
ED: http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/tender/data/d33/AOF75233.htm In ED 2005, only two organisations from NMS (from Czech Republic and Slovenia) were successfull in getting a project as lead agency (compared to a number of 36 lead agencies from Old member states).