All countries in the West Balkan region have started deep and radical changes in order to accelerate the region’s integration into the EU and global markets. This process requests significant expertise (human capacities) to establish strong, well-managed and flexible institutions that will lead this radical change.
Although limited expertise is existing in the region, it is dispersed and isolated among different institutions in different countries, which impedes its efficient use. For this reason the project’s main objective is to support the upgrading, development and sharing of scarce expertise in EU-integration related issues among the agribusiness institutions on the national as well as on the regional level in order to contribute to the sector’s development, economical and political stability of the countries and to a faster integration of the region into the EU and international markets.
The project consortium is established on the basis of good cooperation within the implementation of the Tempus project JEP 15050-2000 and includes the University of Hohenheim, the University of Ljubljana, the Agricultural University of Tirana, the Faculty of Agriculture Sarajevo, the Faculty of Agriculture Skopje and the Faculty of Agriculture Novi Sad. In each partner country the faculties will enhance the consortium by including institutions from their national agricultural sector.
As main medium for fostering the intrasectoral and regional sharing of scarce human resources, the partner countries consortium members will set up a so-called Inter-Country Knowledge Based Platform. In each partner country this platform will dispose of a co-ordinating office and an info-resource center (library and IT cluster) at the partner university.
The main project output is to deliver 8 modules that will deepen the understanding of EU’s structure, agriculture related policies, its legislation and structural funding policy as well as of the requirements to be accomplished by the accession countries and skills necessary for improving the ability of institutions to manage and lead the sector’s further development and reform. It is planned to train 128 experts within the region. For each module, which will be taught in different places within one week, written training material will be developed and disseminated electronically through FAO’s AgroWeb SEE portal as well as in paperback. At the end of each year a regional conference will be organized in order to offer to experts from the region the opportunity to exchange opinions, start developing a dialogue and establish personal connections (32 participants from PC ). The third conference (last one) will include experts from the EU countries as well (28 participants from PC).
The sustainability of the project will be ensured further by the involvement in the delivery of modules of 12 young staff members from the partner universities. Further, in the scope of the project a training on-the-job of 4 weeks will be organized for 8 experts from the partner countries at agricultural institutions in D and SI. The English language course will be organised in each Partner country. In total 60 persons will be trained in the scope of the language courses.
The project management will be ensured by a steering committee which will meet every 6 months and by the local management provided by the partner country representatives in each country. These bodies will be supported by the project coordination office placed at the University of Hohenheim, Eastern Europe Centre, and the platform office (NPO) placed at each partner university.