Аs supporter of the civil society Government allocates budget funds, which are around 4 million Euros in the last 6 years. Although in the annual financial statements these funds are registered under the budget line “transfers to non-governmental organizations” this budget line actually refers not only to the transfers to citizen associations and foundations, but also to the transfers for trade unions, religious communities and political parties which are not registered according to the Law on Citizen Associations and Foundations. Despite the public opinion that the Government support to the civil society is small, it seems that these amounts are not so small, but the actual problem is the way in which money are allocated and the fact that part of the funds are not allocated to CSOs at all. Only few state institutions distribute these funds thorough open call (Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, Ministry of Culture, Agency for Youth and Sport). Usually these funds are allocated by decisions where beneficiary organizations are predetermined (ex. Decision for lottery funds distribution). More transparent procedure is applied only for one small portion of these funds (15.000.000 MKD or 12% of the budget line 463 for 2007).
In the last two years there were efforts to improve the transparency of the procedure for state funds distribution with approval of the Code of good practices for financial support of the citizen associations and foundations from the Budget of the Republic of Macedonia. But the practice shows that the Code is not consistently applied. Additional improvement of this frame has been done at the beginning of this year (January 2009) when the Government approved Programme for financing of programme activities of citizen associations and foundations for 2009. The amount of the funds allocated for this programme again is 15.000.000 MKD. The programme defines five priority objectives, which shows that the Government has formulated its strategy concerning the support to the CSOs. The programme foresees that the procedure for distribution will be according to the Code and responsible institution for its implementation is the General secretariat of the Government. In February 2009 Government also adopted Decision for criteria and procedure for distribution of the funds for programme activities of the citizen associations and foundations from the Budget of the Republic of Macedonia. With this decision organisation criteria are determined and access to these funds is limited only to CSOs, which was not the case in the previous years, and provisions are set to ensure that public interest activities will be supported and that eventual double funding of same activities is prevented. The decision also introduces programme criteria and scoring the application against these criteria.
Despite these improvements, their implementation is great challenge in addition to the transparency of the allocation of the rest of the funds that are distributed by the ministries for which the abovementioned procedure is not implemented. Situation is similar with the lottery funds as a very important source of funding where during the last few years about 1,200,000 Euros are distributed annually. Unfortunately the CSOs and public are not informed of the criteria and procedure for distribution of the lottery funds, there is no public call, and funds are received by small number of organisations predetermined in advance (amount of 817,000 Euros is allocated only to 7 organisations – members of the Union of the organisations for the people with disabilities).
Financial support of CSOs by municipalities is too small to be considered of any significance. Municipalities have very limited funds available for all non‐recurrent expenditure; in many cases they have no funds at all to support CSO projects.
According to the latest data more than 65% of the municipalities in Macedonia provide some funds to the local CSOs. Usually, the amounts are very small and mostly related to the organizational support (provide office facilities, rent, communication fee etc.) rather than project funding.