CONCORD internship for EU election campaign

CONCORD is proposing an internship of 2 months (from 23 April till end of June 2009) for somebody fluent in English to help with its European election campaign. The internship must be part of your school curricula and an internship convention must be signed with the school. CONCORD gives 100 EUR per month for lunch and transportation. If you are interested and can begin on 23rd April, send your cover letter and CV by 17 April to Agnès Philippart, aphilippart@concordeurope.org.

For more information, please read:
http://www.concordeurope.org/Files/media/internetdocumentsENG/1_Home/Com-Intern-ad-2009.doc

Source: http://www.concordeurope.org/

Latest CONCORD Flash

The latest issue of the CONCORD Flash reports the February news from the European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development.

In this issue:
- A word from Per Bo on the transparency of non-profit organisations
- Madrid High-Level Meeting on Food Security for All: a big show with small results
- CONCORD at the informal Development Council meeting
- The Swedish Development Cooperation Agency: an example to follow
- When the European Commission assesses aid delivery by civil society
- Update on CONCORD's Food Facility advocacy – a chronological overview
- Access to medicines in jeopardy
- Focus on the core concern of New Member State platforms
… and many other subjects.

You can download the Flash from the “publication” section of the CONCORD website: http://www.concordeurope.org/ or use the direct link: http://www.concordeurope.org/Files/media/internetdocumentsENG/4_Publications/1_CONCORD_Flash/Flash2009/February2009-Flash-EN.pdf

Information provided by Agnès Philippart, CONCORD

Dochas briefing paper on the global crisis

In a report launched in March 2009, Dóchas, the Irish Association of Non-Governmental Development Organisations, demonstrates how poor countries’ ability to respond to the global crisis is steadily being eroded. The report, entitled “Now is not the time to turn our backs on the poor”, highlights the dramatic impact of the global economic crisis on the world’s poorest people.

The Dóchas report is available at http://www.dochas.ie/documents/Dochas_on_Global_Crisis-March09.pdf
Examples of how Irish Development NGOs are working to reduce world poverty can be found at http://www.dochas.ie/making_poverty_history_together.htm

Information provided by Hans Zomer, Dóchas

Advance Notice: EC Application training

This is to inform all NGOs from new EU member states who submitted a concept note in the 2008 EC development education call for proposals (by February 17) that a TRIALOG training event on "How to write a full EC application" is foreseen for May 2009. If your concept note was selected by the EC and you are invited to submit a full proposal, please inform our capacity building officer Petra Kreinecker at p.kreinecker@trialog.or.at to give us the possibility to possibly plan a further training. Unfortunately we will not be able to provide more than 1-2 training events.

Even if you will not participate in a training event, we would be grateful for information about your submitted EC project and the status of your application - this allows us to collect data for new member states, for comparison and in order to constantly adjust our actitivites according to your needs. Thank you in advance and all the best for your applications!

For further information please contact Petra Kreinecker at p.kreinecker@trialog.or.at

Information provided by Petra Kreinecker, TRIALOG

April 16, 2009: Regional Partnership Programme - Lessons learnt and further perspectives, Vienna

The Regional Partnership Programme (RPP) is an initiative of the development NGDO platforms in Central Europe – Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia. As a first cross-border programme of its kind in Europe, the main goal was to strengthen the capacity and the visibility of development cooperation in the participating New Member States of the EU.

The closing event on April 16 in Vienna will present the final documentation on the results of the programme and the lessons learnt, such as increased visibility of platforms, stronger cooperation among the participating states and the challenges faced when implementing a cross-border programme like the RPP. Based on the experiences made, perspectives and challenges for similar future cooperation will be envisioned.

For more information on the event, please go to: http://www.eu-platform.at/english/start.asp?showmenu=yes&fr=&b=872&ID=227203 or contact Danijela Janosevic, officeRPP@eu-platform.at. To find out more about the results and final publications of the RPP, please read the related article in this TIS: http://trialog-information-service.blogspot.com/2009/04/final-documentation-of-regional.html

Information provided by Danijela Janosevic, RPP

TRIALOG Central Training focused on core concern of NMS platforms

The Central Training is a TRIALOG seminar for development NGO platforms from new EU member states (NMS). For this year’s Central Training, which took place between February 24- 26 in Vienna, we chose the topic of “Financial Sustainability of National Platforms“ since several NMS platforms expressed the need for such a discussion and exchange. The training was organised in close cooperation with the Latvian platform LAPAS and the Polish Platform Grupa Zagranica.

Each NMS platform was invited to participate with the coordinator and a board representative which made up a good group of high level platform representatives who presented the current financial situation of their platforms as well as received new input for their work from the exchange with others and from the speakers’ presentations.

Hans Zomer from the Irish platform Dochas talked about the Dochas strategy on sustainability and about fundraising in a cold climate. CONCORD board member Rilli Lappalainen from the Finnish platform Kehys gave a presentation about regional programmes (such as the FEST project between Finland, Estonia and Sweden) as one way to support the sustainability of platforms. Representatives from Light for the World and Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe shared their experiences about fundraising methods such as communication with major donors, street collections and so on. The question about whether fundraising methods can be copy-pasted to emerging markets was answered differently - not all methods work in all countries, but it might be worth trying out some ideas in the NMS context. As is the case every year, also CONCORD news and priorities for the current year were presented, this time by Policy Officer An Van Goey.

As a result of the training, the need to further assess the financial situation of NMS platforms and the need for national platforms to develop financial strategies as well as to find joint approaches at the European level was felt very urgently. Most of the NMS platforms do not have secured core funding for their activities but depend on project money from governments or other sources, which makes long term financial planning difficult. The very low national platform membership fees often lie even below the level of the CONCORD membership fee of the respective platform. The financial crisis has already had a direct impact on the situation of the development NGO sector in most NMS. Although ODA budget cuts are not limited to NMS, in NMS the cuts are happening at a time when public awareness of, and governmental commitment to, poverty eradication around the globe is less well-established.

The feedback after the Central Training showed that the event was highly valued by the participants as a unique opportunity to discuss issues of vital importance to NMS platforms. Read some quotes:

- The training was excellent and contributed enormously to my understanding.
- It was interesting to see that having a financial strategy is vital for the platform. Here I learned some pretty interesting tips and ideas that will help us to do a very well structured strategy, but also interesting ideas for fundraising.
- What I got from this training is networking, new contacts, maybe not completely new ideas but new approaches to already existing ideas and fun and pleasure.
- For me, it was interesting. Maybe it was not a training in a pure meaning, but for the first time since really a long time we had the chance to openly discuss all the financial questions with the other platform coordinators.

Thanks a lot to all participants and speakers for their input and engagement! Now it is up to all of us not to stop but to incorporate the outcomes in our daily work...

The documentation of the 2009 Central Training (incl. presentations, more quotes/video messages,..) will become available on the TRIALOG website soon. Photos are already available. Visit: http://www.trialog.or.at/start.asp?ID=195

Information provided by Anita Bister, TRIALOG

Montenegro country study published

A new TRIALOG country study has been published, this time on the situation faced by civil society organisations in Montenegro. The report was written for TRIALOG by Maša Lekić, a recent intern from Montenegro who spent five months in the TRIALOG office in Brussels.

The report covers the history, development and main areas of work covered by civil society in the country. The challenges that must still be faced are outlined, including low administrative capacity, low levels of public trust and the need for improved relations between the NGO community and the government. It concludes that despite the relative short history of NGOs in the country, civil society has already started to exert a considerable influence within Montenegro.

TRIALOG's country study on Montenegro can be downloaded from
http://www.trialog.or.at/images/doku/montenegro.pdf

For more information, comments or changes to the text please contact office@trialog.or.at

Information provided by Rebecca Steel, TRIALOG

AidWatch Workshop in Vienna

A number of people responsible for producing the AidWatch report in their countries gathered in Vienna for an AidWatch workshop which was hosted in the TRIALOG offices. The session, on Thursday 5 March 2009, led by CONCORD AidWatch Coordinator Jasmine Burnley and AidWatch report writer Javier Perriera, took participants through the questionnaire used to collect the data, and discussions around its analysis. The main topics that will be covered within the Europe-wide AidWatch report include ownership, conditionality and predictability, as well as transparency.

This session, and a similar workshop held in Malta in February, are part of a longer term capacity development strategy that aims to increase the knowledge and skills of the different platforms (especially in the new member states) and networks involved in AidWatch work, allowing them to contribute more fully to the annual report.

For more information see the AidWatch pages on the CONCORD website:
http://www.concordeurope.org/Public/Page.php?ID=14347&language=eng

Information provided by Rebecca Steel, TRIALOG

EC development education evaluation positive on TRIALOG

In 2008, for the first time EuropeAid has been running an extensive general and pan-European evaluation of the Development Education NGO co-financing over the last 10 years (1998-2007). The aim was to access the relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability of Development Education/Awareness Raising (DE/AR) programmes and projects. The evaluation was done on 40 selected projects and on TRIALOG and DEEEP as targeted projects. The final evaluation report was now released by the EC in February 2009.

The evaluation has been overwhelmingly positive for TRIALOG as one of the very few programmes which allowed the Commission to take a more strategic approach and give more coherence to the budget line. Even if TRIALOG is not exclusively working in the field of DE/AR (but also supporting national and pan-European coordination and networking, general development policy topics, advocacy towards New Member States/NMS governments and EU institutions, capacity building for NMS civil society organisations in a wide range of development topics etc.), the DE evaluation which only looked at the DE related components of the project has been very positive for TRIALOG.

It states that TRIALOG promotes the compatibility between EC procedures and the beneficiary’s capacity, gives more coherence to the budget line and helped to achieve the objectives of the “Co-financing with European Development NGOs” programme. The evaluation clearly says that TRIALOG has increased the capacity of NGOs in NMS to work in DE and initiate dialogue with their own national government as well as networking within the NGO community. TRIALOG has had an impact on civil society’s involvement in the field of development in NMS, which was not so common at the beginning of the enlargement process. By encouraging experiential exchanges between Old Member States and New Member States (e.g. the DE Partnership Fair which we organised in 2006), TRIALOG promoted the success of the EC programme.

Indirectly, TRIALOG’s lobby work for special eligibility criteria and a separate budget for DE/AR projects for NGOs from the new EU member states was not only proven to be the right approach for the EC but additionally, in the recommendations to the EC it’s mentioned to maintain them.

To read more about the results on TRIALOG in the EC evaluation, please go to: http://www.trialog.or.at/images/doku/summary-on-trialog-evaluation.pdf
For the full evaluation report, please turn to: http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/what/civil-society/documents/de-ar_evaluation2008.pdf

Information provided by Christine Bedoya, TRIALOG

Evaluation of EC aid channelled through civil society organisations

This evaluation, covering the period 2000 -2006, assesses the EC aid channelled through civil society organisations (CSOs). Over the period evaluated, the total amount channelled through Civil Society Organisations amounts to 5.3 billion EUR, and a clear increase of CSO channelling can be observed. All in all, 76% of total specified payments have been channelled through Northern CSOs and 24% through Southern CSOs.

The three main conclusions according to the evaluation summary are:

• The participatory development agenda, adopted by the EC, is gradually changing the use of the CSO channel but the participatory development agenda has not yet been fully internalised by the Commission. The EC still lacks a consistent, shared and institutionalised strategy to manage the CSO channel (across regions, sectors and themes)


• The added value of the CSO channel is not optimally used by the EC because the EC is not
  well-equipped to properly deal with the question all along the cooperation cycle, i.e. from the identification phase (“what added value can CSOs, in all their diversity, offer in a given
  context?”) to the design phase and related choice of implementation modalities (“how best to support CSOs to fully realise their added value?”).


• There is a mixed record with regard to results, impact and sustainability. Evidence has been collected of positive effects on a project level. However it is less evident to draw firm
  conclusions with regard to the sustainable impact of these interventions, particularly considering that broader processes of societal change require a longer time span to achieve results, valid questions can be raised on the likelihood of sustainable impact of aid channelled through CSOs.

For the full report, the summary and a presentation of main outcomes and recommendations, please visit: http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/how/evaluation/evaluation_reports/2008/1259_docs_en.htm

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/how/evaluation/evaluation_reports/evinfo/2008/1259_ev_en.pdf

EC presentation during the Multistakeholders meeting

On the 25th of February 2009, the "Non-state actors and local authorities in development (NSA-LA) Multistakeholders Meeting" – also known as the “Quadrilogue” Meeting – convened by Mr. Ridolfi, Head of the EC's EuropeAid Cooperation Office (Direction F “Thematic Programm”) – took place, bringing together representatives from the EC, the European Parliament, the Member States and European Civil Society Organisations (CSOs).

Mr. Ridolfi gave a presentation (see link below) on the results of the Call for Proposals 2007, on the Annual Action Plan 2008 and 2009 and on the results of the external evaluation of the EC-programme on Development Education over the last 10 years (see also related TIS article at: http://trialog-information-service.blogspot.com/2009/03/ec-development-education-evaluation.html).

Although the presentation did not only tackle very new topics, some very interesting and relevant information from the EC´s perspective was given:

The contract results demonstrate, that projects with lead agencies from New Member States (NMS), financed within the Development Co-operation Instrument DCI for projects in developing countries, will receive only 0,3% of the budget-line's total amount (see slide Nr. 13).

As a conclusion regarding the already past Call for Proposal-procedure of the 2007 budget, he highlighted, that “NMS are highly represented in partnerships (regarding projects within the thematic line NSA-LA “Public awareness and education for development in Europe “), although further efforts need to be made to encourage their participation as main applicants” (see slide Nr. 24).

As the Call for Proposals 2008 on “Public awareness and education for development in Europe“ has been closed only some two weeks ago (February 17, 2009), the preliminary information about the number of received concept notes is still very global: the EC received 400 project proposals in total, 62 more than in the past year (see slide Nr. 28).

We would like to highlight the published “plans ahead” of the EC for the next steps: the contracting of the selected projects is scheduled for the time between January and March 2010, while the next Call for Proposals with the planned budget of the year 2010, will be launched in March or April next year (see slide Nr. 43).

For further information, download the EC presentation from the following link: http://www.trialog.or.at/images/doku/stakeholders-meeting-25-02-09-final.pdf

Information provided by Petra Kreinecker, TRIALOG

Introductory Seminar on the Cotonou Agreement in Romania

The Romanian NDGO platform (FOND) organized an introductory seminar on the Cotonou Agreement on the 29th January 2009, in Bucharest. It was for the first time when a public debate was made on this topic.

The purpose of this seminar was to present a general overview of the agreement emphasizing the political and trade implications for Romania. The speakers invited were Florent Sebban (Department of Foreign Relations of the French NGDO Platform - Coordination Sud), Monica Alexandru (Department of Assistance for Development , the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Dan Maxim – general deputy director (Department of Foreign Trade, the Romanian Ministry of Small and Medium Enterprises, Commerce and Environmental Affairs). Among the participants at this seminar there were FOND members, mass-media, representatives from the UK Embassy in Romania, UNDP Romania, the Ministry of Education and Research and political science students.

Romania ratified the revised Cotonou Agreement in the beginning of 2008. As it became a member of the European Union only in 2007, Romania had no influence in the revision of the Cotonou Agreement and had to accept “by default” all the EU agreements.

It was interesting to notice during the seminar that the Romanian Ministry of Trade is aware of the fact that one of the objectives of the agreement is the eradication of poverty. The Romanian Government seems to agree with the generally shared view that one of the means of achieving it is to integrate the economies of the ACP countries (African, Caribbean and Pacific States) in the global economy. It seems that the Romanian Government shows no signs of interest to consider also the problematic aspects of the liberalization of the African states’ economies, despite Romania’s own transition experience before the accession to the EU. Civil society organizations have emphasized that the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) pose a serious threat to the local producers in the ACP countries. Representatives of the Romanian Government also mentioned that at present there is a low interest from the part of the Romanian state towards Africa, despite its intention to renew old connections with some African states.

The seminar concluded with a very interesting message, inspired by our French speaker on which civil society representatives agreed: Although it has no direct interest in the African countries and no heritage as a colonizer, precisely because of those reasons Romania should try at least to respect ACPs by supporting their cause and interests in Brussels.

This event was organized as part of the FOND project: “Development Cooperation in Romania: Building FOuNDation for Policy Work ”, financed by the Presidency Fund (http://www.presidencyfund.org/).

Information provided by Adela Rusu, FOND, http://www.fondromania.org/

Czech NGOs met Swedish Minister for Development Cooperation

On the eve of the Informal Meeting of the EU Development Ministers in Prague (29-30 January 2009), Czech NGO representatives had the chance to debate democratic governance support, one of the topics of the Informal Meeting, with Gunilla Carlsson, the Swedish Minister for International Development Cooperation.

Both parties exchanged their views on democracy, development cooperation and the role of democratisation processes in the eradication of poverty.

Apart of the Swedish minister, also Catherine von Heidenstam, the Swedish Ambassador to the Czech Republic, and Tomas Brundin, Deputy Director of the Department for Development Policy of the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, were present at the meeting.

The meeting was arranged by FoRS – Czech Forum for Development Co-operation, in cooperation with CONCORD Sweden; it was hosted by the Czech NGO People in Need. The Czech NGOs were furthermore represented by DEMAS – Czech platform for democracy assistance organisations, and Green Circle – association of environment NGOs.

For more information on the meeting, please contact FoRS Policy Officer Zuzana Sladkova, policy@fors.cz

Information provided by Zuzana Sladkova, FoRS

TRIALOG training for "EC newcomers" in Latvia

At the end of January 2009, TRIALOG realised the second 2 day training on “How to write an EC proposal” in Latvia (the first one took place in early 2008).

To get into the topic, we started with presenting the frame of the EU-strategy 2007 – 2010 of the thematic programme Non-State Actors and Local Authorities, the Annual Action Plan 2008 and the Call for Proposal on Development Education and Awareness Raising in Europe.

7 participants from different Latvian NGOs worked together and decided spontaneously during the workshop, to elaborate one concrete common project to raise awareness in Latvia on development issues. In the meanwhile, the group of 5 NGOs submitted a concept note within the call by the deadline in February.

So far, Latvia is one of the few EU new member states which did not make much use of the EC development education budget line and as a consequence, no Latvian NGO was so far awarded an EC development education contract as applicant. We hope that the training was one little further step for Latvian development NGOs to compete successfully at the EU level for development education funds in future.

Information provided by Petra Kreinecker, TRIALOG