Today, on April 3, the second meeting of the Steering Committee of the “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” Project took place.
The members of the project consortium, members and observers of the project headquarters, representatives of the sub-grantee coalitions of the project, as well as Mr. Paulius Strelciunas, the International Aid/Cooperation Officer of the Delegation of the European Union to Armenia, were present at the session.
“On behalf of the EU, it is a pleasure to be here today and basically to be able to hear the delegates of the project firsthand. Very briefly, this steering committee meeting for us has three objectives. The first one is to know what has been done in the past months. The second one which is very important to hear is what are the main challenges, what are the main problems, to know to address them before the end of the project. And thirdly, it is also an important goal to move forward over the next six months, despite the fact that there is only a short time left till the end of the project, there are still some things to do,” Mr. Paulius Strelciunas said in his welcoming speech.
Mr. Hakop Avagyan, member of the Founding board of the Small and Medium Entrepreneurship Cooperation Association, noted that the gathering in this format is the second. “Today we have to summarize the results we have achieved at this point. We need to understand the unresolved information, if necessary, to make some changes and fix it on the day of our next session,” Hakob Avagyan said.
Mr. Karen Zadoyan, President of the Armenian Lawyers’ Association, thanked the attendees for participating in the meeting, emphasizing the importance of the Steering Committee session. “Today, we will summarize the results we have recorded in the period from September to April 1, we will mention the problems, as well as what will be done to implement in the last 6 months of the project,” Karen Zadoyan said.
He presented the work done within the framework of the project, noting that it was launched on 15 December, 2016, and will last for 34 months, the total cost of the project is about 2 million 222 thousand Euros, of which 2 million will be financed by the European Union.
Karen Zadoyan mentioned that within the framework of the program 9 sub-grants with the amount of 8.5 million AMD each were provided to CSO coalitions for capacity building. In addition, another 29 sub-grants with the amount of 5.5 million AMD each were provided to CSOs members of CSO Incubators.
He also presented the studies, analyzes, and the recommendations presented to different relevant bodies, meetings and discussions held in different formats, the sectoral achievements and so on.
The participants of the meeting discussed questions and presented their proposals. One of the issues raised by the audience concerned the difficulties in the work with the ministries. They pointed out the problem that when the CSO develop a program, reached agreement with an official and start the implementation, the official leaves the office and the organisations are forced to start their work from scratch. According to the participants, this is a serious problem, as the priority problems of the Ministry is changing with every changing official.
In response to the questions raised, Mr. Paulius Strelciunas said that the “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” project is a large-scale action and there are many questions that are not always known to the EU and they become aware of them during such meetings. “During our meetings with the government, when we are usually presented with recent developments, we also seek to receive evidence from the field, and this factual evidence comes from you, the field workers. We can assure you that everything that is mentioned here, all of your messages, concerns and strategies, will be taken into account by the EU. And also we can make sure that all these messages are being transferred up to the higher level up to Brussels,” Mr. Paulius Strelciunas said.
He noted that the EU has leverage to remind the government of these problems so that they take into account all of this when a political dialogue is underway and new programmes are envisaged.
The next meeting of the Steering Committee will be held on 10 October, 2019.
The “Commitment to Constructive Dialogue” project is implemented with the financial support of the European Union by a consortium of civil society organisations, which are the “Armenian Lawyers’ Association” NGO, Agora Central Europe o.p.s (an NGO from the Czech Republic), the “Armenian Center for Democratic Education-CIVITAS” NGO, the “International Center for Human Development” Public Organisation, the “SME Cooperation Association” NGO and the Union of Communities of Armenia.
The project aims to enhance the influence of civil society organisations (CSOs) and CSO coalitions/networks on public policies in Armenia. This will allow organisations that are already working in sectoral coalitions to access additional resources, new groups of civil society experts to come together and encourage their participation in the local and national policy agenda, to identify common concerns and priorities and approach government bodies with constructive and strategic policy engagement initiatives.
