Reuniting Europe bidding round launch
So this year's RE conference is over. Almost forty staff gathered in Istanbul for three days. This is practically the only time we can all get together away from our desks. This year we added training workshops to the conference, giving us a chance to improve skills on designing and evaluating projects. If you've not got a good design in the first place, how can you evaluate it; and once you have a good design, you need to know what to look for and where to find it.
People bring along example projects they have managed and discuss them with the trainers and then in breakout groups. We assess the Project Purpose, the Outputs, the Activities (and make sure people know what these words mean - what the difference is between one and the other).
After the training was completed we brought in our expert speakers to bring everyone up to date on what we call our Country Business Plans - basically what the Embassies want to do and why; on how to improve getting our messages across; we set up a teleconference to dig into solving technical headaches (and thankfully the technology worked); and trying to make Brussels funding systems more comprehensible. Having teams from everywhere from Albania to Zagreb in one place, we use the time to network and talk of lessons learned over the past year - what has worked and what has gone wrong and what we are going to do about it.
Teams are now heading back to base for the launch of the Reuniting Europe bidding round, on 1st October - and if you're a prospective project implementer, that's a key date for you. The month of October is the window for implementers to talk to Embassy contacts and see whether their ideas could be worked up into a bid. This coming week we in the London team will be updating the website with all the new information everyone needs. I'm working on it at the moment here in the lounge at Alexander The Great airport, Skopje, Macedonia - which has free internet, which is very convenient
Posted at 15:25 20 September 2008 by Chris Frean | Comments[0]
Welcome to my blog. This is quite new to me, although I have been trying to get IT-literate via facebook. My daughters assure me, with a mere 50-odd friends on that, though, that I am way behind. I'm based in London at the moment and have a central role in deciding how approximately £14m of British taxpayers' money is used. That sounds scary, although is £14m a lot in the bigger picture, when the Department for International Development can spend £50m a year in one country alone? There are several UK government Strategic Programme Funds out there which exist to support our policy goals. The one I work on is named “Re-uniting Europe” (RE). I also work on the Balkans Conflict Prevention Pool (BCPP), which funds work in Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia,Herzegovina and Macedonia.
Our current RE focus is on our annual Re-uniting Europe conference, which we’re holding in Istanbul next week. It’s the annual get-together for staff from our Embassies throughout the countries where we fund projects – everywhere from Croatia and Macedonia to Belarus and Azerbaijan. We take stock of what we’ve achieved; listen to presentations from experts; and discuss how changes in London affect what we do; for example this year, we’ll be having the FCO’s new Strategic Communications experts explaining their role.
Istanbul is a convenient hub for the “Reuniting Europe” Fund’s countries, being a direct flight for almost all. But despite my best efforts to coincide the event with a Champions League tie, Galatasaray were knocked out, and Fenerbahce, whose qualification was decidedly lucky anyway, are away to Porto. I’ll let you know how the conference went in my next blog
Posted at 11:05 09 September 2008 by e-Media | Comments[0]