Exploring Opportunities for NISPAcee and UNDP Cooperation

On June 30, 2015 UNDP representatives Robert Bernardo, UNDP Policy Specialist on Capacity Development and Institutional Strengthening, Elena Danilova-Cross, UNDP Programme Specialist on Poverty and Inequality and Marta Diavolova, Programme Adviser from UNFPA visited NISPAcee Headquarters in Bratislava. They met with Ludmila Gajdosova, NISPAcee Executive Director, Juraj Sklenar, Info and PR Manager and Elena Zakova, Project Manager in order to explore opportunities for further cooperation.

 

The visit was organised based on successfully implemented joint projects and activities in the NISPAcee region in the past and the recent joint Capacity Building workshop organised in collaboration with UNDESA – UNDP - NISPAcee during the last NISPAcee Annual Conference held in Tbilisi, Georgia, in May 2015.

The current UNDP regional centre located in Istanbul, Turkey is focused on 20 countries of the NISPAcee region. This creates anatural opportunity to join efforts and create synergies. Therefore, the meeting objectives were to understand each other’s major areas of current work related to institutional strengthening at the national level, particularly with regard to the SDGs/MDGs and national/sub-national monitoring and evaluation systems and to identify potential areas of joint engagement on the SDGs and national institutional strengthening in these regards. The core question of discussion was how NISPAcee and its members could contribute to the SDGs throughout appropriate education, training and research activities.

There will be an urgent need to launch monitoring and evaluation systems at national and regional level when the SDGs are adopted in September 2015. Only the public authorities of limited countries are preparing for this and it is obvious that appropriate training of the relevant civil servants could help. This seems to be a challenge and NISPAcee, with its expert capacities and networks could be extremely helpful in coping with this. Therefore the representatives of both organisations agreed to continue in the communication and preparation of joint activities which could begin as soon as the SDGs are adopted.