In Focus: Overview of the Year 2013

CEF's Annual Report for the year 2013 is now available. Below please find some of the most important highlights of the year. To read more about the CEF 2013 developments please refer to CEF Annual Report 2013.

˃˃˃ 2013 was marked by an important milestone in the Slovenian Government's effort to change the CEF's legal status to an international organization. The signing ceremony of the Agreement on Establishing the Center of Excellence in Finance as an International Organization took place in September 2013. This is the first step on the road towards becoming an international organization and it will enable us to further improve the quality of our programs and projects.

˃˃˃ To ensure that we serve as a catalyst for bringing the right expertise to beneficiaries we build on strong relationships with partner organizations. We are very proud that in the past year many of our partners showed us their trust and recognition of our work. The European Commission entrusted us the role of implementing partner in the Strategic Planning and Budgeting (SPB) project. Moreover, the World Bank and its donor partners selected us to serve as the secretariat of PEMPAL network for the second time in a row. In addition, the German government decided to fund the continuation of the internal audit certification program in Montenegro under the CEF coordination.

˃˃˃ Our relationship with the IMF continued to bring good results as a consequence of complementarity of training and technical assistance. We are witnessing excellent results in the topic areas covered by the IMF technical experts and this encouraged us to think about the CEF fellowships or staff exchanges that would bring in resident experts for specific priority areas that are not covered by existing partnership with the IMF-FAD. We are also proud that our traditionally fertile relationship with Dutch partners – Ministry of Finance and Central Bank in delivering workshops continues to stay strong.

˃˃˃ We strive to deliver high-quality learning programs and are aware that this can only be achieved with good understanding of the learning needs across our region and beyond. Therefore, we organized in the framework of the SPB project a High-level Policy Dialogue on SPB in South East Europe that brought together ministers, governors and other top officials from across the region and international experts. The highly participatory discussion resulted in a number of promising ideas and suggestions on how to further develop capacities and expertise for the design, implementation and coordination of economic and fiscal policies in South East Europe. We took this valuable input into account in designing and implementing the project learning activities.