The All Secretariats’ Meeting of the CSO Partnership for Development Cooperation (CPDE) this year took place from 7th-10th June in Beirut, Lebanon. It is a governance meeting among its various units which serves as an opportunity to discuss progress in implementation, existing gaps and steps to improve its work as a Platform in its programme of work for the forthcoming year. The meeting was attended by constituency representatives of 5 geographical regions and 7 sectors who presented their work and achievements in the past period and jointly work on co-craton of future activities of the Platform via 4 different workshops. The European Region was represented by Biljana Spasovska from the Balkan Civil Society Development Network, which is the sub-regional CPE Secretariat for the Balkan sub Region.
Ms. Spasovska presented the European Region Constituency Report outlining what have been the CPDE activities, main achievements and challenges during the past year, and the main outcomes of the research within the Regional Observatorio Project based on the reports and prepared by the current European Regional Secretariat of CPDE – the Romanian NGDO Platform – FOND.
The meeting was opened with opening remarks of Ms. Zahra Bazzi, the Secretaraiat coordinatior for the MENA region and representative of the host organization for the meeting – the Arab NGO Network for Development (ANND) who spoke about the current developments and challenges for development cooperation in the region. Ms. Amy Padilla, the Executive Director of IBON International and CPDE Fiscal Sponsor had a keynote address presenting the international situation with the development cooperation.
The rest of the first day of the meetings was devoted to discussions on the CPDE work in all regions and sectors during the past period and sharing of of main achievements, challenges and identifying future common actions. There were two workshops where participants had the chance to work in groups 1) to identify common synergies and set future policy objectives and 2) to translate the policy objectives into concrete joint advocacy strategy and plan. There were 4 working groups, each of them worked on one of these 4 issues:
- Domestication of EDC commitments at the country-level
- Financialisation of development cooperation
- Securitisation of development cooperation
- Repression of civic spaces.
The second day of the All Secretariat’s Meeting in started with presentations on the workplans on potential emerging advocacy issues and a workshop where the four groups were developing communication plans on advocacy of the advocacy plans developed in the previous day. The last session was a presentation of the 2018 Programme Plan and Budget by the Programme Manager, Robert Piunavin.
The third day of the meeting was devoted to the Regional Observatorio and presentation of each of the regional projects as well as identifying further capacity needs, potential of policy influencing and charting of roadmaps for further activities. After sharing the outcomes of the regional and sectoral workshops the working part of the All Secretariat’s Meeting was concluded with a summary session of agreed action points, agreements and next steps. A solidarity night was organized on the last evening of the All Secretariats meeting where all participants visited at a local migrant center, while the last day was devoted for visits of 2 refugee camps.
Photos and other information is available at CPDE’s Facebook Page.