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]