Interview February 2009

Lempnet: Dear Ms Pusterla, thank you very much for your agreement for the interview. To start with, could you please briefly present yourself, what is your current position?

NP: Thank you for the invitation and the interest. My name is Nicoletta Pusterla and I am a Programme Officer at the EU Commission, precisely at the DG EuropeAid, which deals with the implementation of external policy activities. More particularly, I work with the Unit, which deals with thematic budgetlines: series of programmes, conceived by the EU Commission.

Lempnet: What are main EU instruments for support of the employers’ organizations?

NP: These thematic programmes are complementary to, what we call, geographic programmes; the thematic programmes focus on support to the civil society and non-state actors . If you have a look at what we do in the geographic programmes (our policy here is to directly support countries, ACP countries, for instance), you will see that there is a lot of budget support, direct support to governments, while our thematic programmes are more people-to-people. Most of them are open to the non-state actors.

One of these programmes is called “Investing in People”, and this programme is of particular interest for employers’ organizations. Within the “Investing in People” programme, there are different components (specific themes); one of them is concerned with social cohesion and employment: social protection, labour market information systems (LMIS). 

What is very interesting is that these programmes are open for proposals. This means that these programmes work not only via some joint management agreements with ILO (namely in the field of employment and social cohesion), but also with civil society organizations, including organizations representing social partners. Such organizations can participate: preparing their own project and submit a proposal.

Regarding the “Investing in People” programme (with the focus on the ACP countries); there are two calls for proposals to be launched at the beginning of 2009. They will be concerned with the capacity building in labour market information systems and technical vocational education and training (TVET) . Employers’ organizations, as non-state actors, can directly participate and prepare their proposals. The only thing to be taken into account this year is that there are some geographic restrictions.

All the related information you can find in our “Annual Action Programme” on line. While waiting for publication of a call for proposal, you can have a look at the EuropeAid website and the “Annual Action Programme” published there (usually is published during the summer period or even earlier). It contains a number of specific sections where you can already find the types of eligible actions and types of eligible actors, thus you can foresee the possible types of activities and start to prepare a project proposal.

There is also another thematic programme - “Non-state actors and local authorities in development”. It is not precisely focused on employment and social cohesion, but is potentially open to social partners, including employers’ organizations. The main feature of the programme is that it is demand-driven and has actor-oriented approach. There are many possibilities within the programme as its main aim is poverty reduction. I believe some activities of employers’ organizations would perfectly fit into it. There are two ways of implementing this programme in our partner countries (basically non-EU countries): 

• Multi-country regional actions
  The actions should have a strong component on capacity building of civil society and on support of civil society in its effort to participate in the development process and to influence policies.
  There are definitely some possibilities there for employers’ organizations but in this case, they have to cooperate at regional level (there should be at least two countries in the region).
• In-country actions
  This is another option, which is limited to a number of countries. To name a few, a number of ACP countries, such as Kenya, Swaziland etc. are concerned.  In some case the priorities are already narrowed, according to a country situation, in other cases they are larger. You can consult an overview of the expected calls for proposals in the respective countries (Annual Action Programme) on our website.

Lempnet: Based on your experience, what advice could you give to employers’ organizations looking for fundraising opportunities in EU? Where do they have to start with and what can they do to increase their chances of success?

NP: (1) Start as a partner or one of the beneficiaries
First, I would say, that we are very well aware that applying for EU funds is not easy: you really need to have certain knowledge on project cycle management to prepare a proposal and to work a lot on building your partnerships for a project. When you have lack of experience, one good option for the first time would be to participate in the project as a partner or as one of the beneficiaries, and not as a lead applicant. You have to bear in mind that in any case we have some requirements concerning reporting etc.

(2) Apply to projects you can manage
Another advice would be to apply to a project of a reasonable size, i.e. according to your experience. Looking through the proposals, we also assess applicants’ capacity (operational and financial). If we see that, an applicant has always managed a very small project and than applies for a very big one, than we would have some doubts.

(3) Start gradually
I would also advise to start gradually:  start with calls of proposals which are targeted only to one country and which are managed by our delegation (Delegation of the EU Commission) in the non-EU countries. These proposals characterize with smaller grants and this can be an option to start with instead of commencing with a big regional project.

Lempnet: You collaborate with a huge number of partners and countries around the world. How EuropeAid provides for the organization and evolvement of its network?

NP: That is a very good question. We have some tools for consultation and contacts, for instance, in the framework of the preparation of our “Annual Action Programme”. Each year we prepare this document, in which we say exactly how we will implement the programme. Upon determined strategy each year, we run a process of consultation in order to decide on how and in which modality we will implement it. For instance in the framework on the "Non State Actors and Local Authorities in Development" we have multi-stakeholder meetings in Brussels, while the European Commission delegations in partner countries also run regular consultations with local non state actors.

Lempnet: Thank you very much for the interview!

Done in January 2009