modified Friday, 07 October 2011

2010 - 2011

In 2011, the "112 for Structural Funds" project continues with funds from the Open Society Institute and Balkan Trust for Democracy. This time we focus on evaluating the implementing of the Operational Programs and on the tangible, real, impact of the European money on the Romanian society.

Our objectives for 2011 are quite ambitious:

• To increase NGO intervention in central authorities' decision making related to structural funds programming and implementation;
• To raise awareness on the role of NGOs in structural funds absorption and social impact of their projects;
• To identify and advocate for practical solutions to overcome the obstacles that NGOs face in accessing 6 Sectorial Operational Programs.

And we'll reach those objectives through several activities and methods:

• An Early Warning System (EWS) was set up in our previous project - "112 for structural funds" (see the section Finished Projects). Using this system, NGOs sent hundreds of notifications about things that go wrong in managing projects with structural funding. The coalition will continue to promote and to use the EWS to collect such information and bring it to the attention of Managing Authorities.
• A team of 4 experts will compose a task force in the project. It will ensure the necessary technical expertise for coalition's proposals.
• Based on the information collected from beneficiaries, analyzing relevant documents (evaluation reports, auditing reports, programming documents) the coalition will release position papers regarding all 6 SOPs and will advocate for improvements.
• Ongoing working groups. Three working groups have been set up to work with the Managing Authority of the HRDSOP. Meetings already took place and proved to be fruitful. We will continue to work with these 3 groups during this project. For each one of the other 5 SOPs, new working groups will be set up. Members of the groups will be individuals coming from leading NGOs in the areas covered by the SOPs.
• Seeking to learn from other country experience, we will organize study visits of coalition experts to collect and put into practice new ideas on how to advocate for better access of NGOs to European funds.
• An awareness campaign will be organized to pursue governmental stakeholders to consider NGOs as relevant actors in the development of the country and to better understand what the NGO sector have done for Romania and what it could continue doing if the access to structural funds would be better tailored. It is also meant to empower NGOs to have a stronger voice in this area.

This is a project funded by the Open Society Institute and Balkan Trust for Democracy.