Germany
18.09.2017

Networking-Meeting Eastern Partnership and Russia

We, together with inmedio (Berlin) and CSSP (Berlin) hosted the networking conference for the Networking Eastern Partnership and Russia 2017 in cooperation with the Federal Foreign Office.

It was the first time that all German grantees of the Eastern Partnership and Russia Funding-Program came together. During the conference German CSOs had the chance to exchange their views and experiences regarding the project-implementation, as well as towards the funding procedures.
On the welcoming speech Federal Foreign Office representative gave a brief speech about EP and Russia programs of future cooperation. Afterwards CRISP gave an overview of the projects implemented by the EPR-Program and set a solid basis for all further formal and informal talks during the conference.

During the conference, the attendees were divided into five groups. During the morning sessions they worked on national and respectively regional questions and challenges. During the afternoon sessions we built thematic groups according to the content and methodical interests.  Here the attendees discussed how to further strengthen cooperation in the following topics:
•    who works with whom
•    challenges of project implementation on the ground
•    synergy potentials and possibilities of cooperation,
•    concrete planning of continuous networking activities

The CSOs also adopted a new visual identity for the partnership, to better highlight its more structured approach around the discussed priority areas.

The Eastern Partnership of the Federal Office was launched in 2014 with the main focus on regional cooperation in the countries Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Since 2016 the program also included Russia as a target country. It is reform-driven and focuses on increasing the resilience of the partner countries as well as stabilizing the relations in general.