Montenegro

International Aid Transparency Initiative Consultation Workshop for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States

Budva, 6 and 7 July 2009

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Government of Montenegro organized a two day regional workshop with an aim to respond to the needs of all stakeholders, particularly partner country governments. In order to inform the development of the IATI standards, UNDP – as a member of the IATI Steering Committee - has been tasked with facilitating detailed consultations with partner country government officials and Parliamentarians in order to better understand their priorities and aid information needs. This will help to ensure that IATI is developed in a way that meets as many of those needs as possible.

In his opening remarks given on the first workshop day, H.E. Ambassador Mr. Milorad Šćepanović, Assistant to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Montenegro expressed pleasure with selection of Montenegro as a host to this workshop. ‘’Having in mind Montenegro’s recent accession to the IATI, I wish to emphasise our readiness and aspiration to contribute to developing its standards. It is our joint duty to focus on assistance and other resources of donor countries, in order to direct our work towards increasing accountability in the aid recipient countries, where most of the stakeholders require transparency of the whole budget. International aid transparency requires publishing information regarding aid in a way that is most useful for those who deal with accountability. As a partner country and the first country from the South East Europe that acceded to IATI, Montenegro is ready to take over all the activities that will contribute to improving the free development and implementation of duties evolving from this important Initiative. However, the political will of partner countries, as well as donor countries will be of a great importance for the improvement of aid efficiency with an aim to increase its effect on poverty and inequality reduction, capacity building and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals,” said Ambassador Šćepanović.

‘’This meeting is dedicated to the exchange of experiences related to transparency and accountability in donor assistance, and is a consultative workshop for the recipient countries,“ said Mr. Alexander Avanessov, UNDP Resident Representative/UN Resident Coordinator in Montenegro. “This internal meeting is dedicated to discussion on how the aid information flow is organized in the recipient countries; and the exchange of experiences between colleagues from different countries is very useful and it will enable us to identify problems and challenges in this area, to try and find solutions to these challenges and to work in the most efficient way in future,’’ Mr. Avanessov pointed out.

Ms. Daša Šilović, Senior Policy Advisor, Bureau for Development Policy, Capacity Development Group, UNDP New York said: ’’First I would like to thank the Government of Montenegro for hosting this workshop. We here have representatives of Uzbekistan, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia, and other countries and we are very glad to be able to exchange experiences, in a free atmosphere, as well as to advise and cooperate with each other on these issues, which in general means creation of standards for monitoring and reporting on development assistance. This also means equal participation and engagement of the Governments in this process, as much as the civil societies. We hope that the donors who accessed the Initiative, such as the European Commission, will also respect the principles of transparency, provision of information in a timely manner and accountability for the joint work for development.’’

On the second workshop day, H.E. Ms. Gordana Đurović, Minister for European Integration in the Government of Montenegro emphazised that in the context of economic crisis, which we are still experiencing, we need to dedicate a lot of attention to the good coordination of development assistance programmes. ’’Activities that we have taken in this regard include positioning of the cabinet of the Deputy Prime Minister for international economic cooperation, structural reforms and improvement of the business environment which is competent to coordinate the debt management and to establish relations with donors’ programmes. A very important activity that we are conducting in cooperation with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – Mission to Montenegro and European Commission Delegation to Montenegro, started on 2 December last year, when we had the first donor coordination meeting and when we intensified this initiative in terms of better coordination.  This meeting resulted with a plan to organize sectoral donor meetings, and by now those meetings were held for the sectors of environmental protection, judiciary, and anti-corruption,” said Ms. Đurović.  She also pointed out that those donor meetings should continue in cooperation with the United Nations, and that it is planned to further decentralize authorities of the relevant Ministries and to improve the information technology support. In practical terms, this would mean creation of a database on all potential projects delegated towards donors, current projects as well as on the projects that donors plan to implement in our region or in Montenegro concretely. ’’This is at the same time reiterated request of donors, but also awareness and a need to create such a database. There were many incentives, many times we promised that we will do it, but we really hope that this time we will be able to achieve that, because lessons learnt show that it needs to be as simple as possible, not a complicated software that would be difficult to use and access,” Ms. Đurović concluded.  

H.E. Ambassador Mr. Leopold Maurer, Head of the European Commission Delegation to Montenegro reminded that the European Commission Delegation to Montenegro is responsible for the implementation of the IPA funds (instrument of the pre-accession) in Montenegro. ’’As such, we are the biggest individual donor with 30 million dollars per year. In this context, we have to function within the legislative related to the pre-accession assistance, and that legislative anticipates the obligation to coordinate donors’ assistance in order to ensure that the money invested by the European tax payers is used in the most appropriate way. We in Montenegro have a high level of cooperation with the UNDP, and they are also the implementing agency for certain projects. One of those projects is intended for preparation of civil society organizations and other potential recipients to apply for the funds. In this way they are being directed on how to fill in the documentation, how to use certain expressions, etc., given that the whole process is pretty complicated. In regard to our cooperation with the civil society, we are planning to establish one regional Secretariat in Montenegro with an aim to support CSOs and to help them to apply for these funds.  It is a well known fact that the European Commission is the biggest donor in the world, so we are very much interested in all the IATI standards, such as transparency, public availability of data on donors’ assitance. We are cooperating with the United Nations System in Montenegro, but with other donors as well, whether they are EU member countries or third party countries,’’ said Mr. Maurer.   

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IATI is a new initiative which aims to make information about aid flows more available and accessible to all stakeholders, particularly partner countries. Launched at the Accra High Level Forum in September 2008, IATI now has sixteen donor signatories** and endorsement from a growing number of partner countries***.

This regional workshop was aimed at government officials involved in aid management and tracking activities from countries in Europe and the CIS. Participants were representatives of a range of partner country institutions (Ministries of Finance, Planning, central banks and interested line ministries). Representatives of the following countries attended the workshop in Budva: Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo-UN administered territory under UN Security Council Resolution SB 1244, Kyrgyzstan, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

IATI Information Sheet
Osnovne informacije o IATI