The main foreign donors include: Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), USAID, the European Commission, Dutch Embassy, British Embassy and SIDA. SDC has been an important supporter of citizens’ participation and civil society development, particular through fostering Community Forums and establishing NGO support centers. It has recently launched three‐year programme (2009‐2011) called Civil Society Support Facility implemented by Centre for Institutional Development (CIRa) providing institutional and project grants to assist CSOs to exercise critical oversight of equitable, non‐discriminatory and efficient public service delivery, as well as well as oversight of budgeting and financial management of public expenditure and private sector practices worth 2.5 million EUR. USAID has invested in Civil Society Support Programme run by the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) between 2005 and 2010 in support of CSOs at the national and local levels to carry out advocacy and engage in policy making (480 project grants and capacity building inputs to 470 CSOs with a budget of approx 4.8 million EUR.
The European Commission supports civil society-related activities under IPA Component I, II and IV (to become operational only). Support under Component I is currently focused on large technical assistance projects for capacity building of state institutions mediating government‐civil society relations (Unit for Cooperation in the General Secretariat), rather than directly supporting CSOs and their activities. IPA 2009, however, will concentrate exclusively on grant schemes to CSOs. IPA 2 CBC includes grants to CSOs and municipalities for a range of socio‐economic two‐country partnership projects. The total amount that will be announced in 2009 is around 11 million euro (Macedonia/Greece 2,25 million, Macedonia/Albania 2,2 million and Macedonia/Bulgaria 6,6 million EUR). In addition, support of small‐scale human rights and democratization activities by grassroots organizations is also available (approx. 600,000 EUR annually). Macedonian CSOs are also eligible to Community Programmes such as 7th Framework Programme, Progress, Culture, Citizens for Europe, Youth in Action and Lifelong Learning Programme.
Overall CSOs budgets/annually
The analyses on annual budgets of CSO are not done. According to the collected information from the members of Civic Platform of Macedonia in 2007, organizational budgets have decreased by 20% since 2004.