FISR Project Wrap Up
After three years and some months, we successfully brought the project Strengthening Line Ministries’ Capacities to Assess Fiscal Implications of Structural Reforms (or FISR) to an end. The project has been carried out by the CEF from 2019 and has included more than 90 learning initiatives and other events that connected about 1,500 people from Western Balkans and Turkey who are involved in the process of Economic Reform Programmes (ERPs).
We marked this milestone with two events in Istanbul, Tukey on March 22-23, 2022. We started with the Regional Networking for Structural Reforms, a training of trainers that focused on the knowledge legacy of the FISR project. The ERP teams and experts took stock of all learning materials—over 500, including around 20 knowledge products, i. e. videos, brochures, papers, guidelines and other publications that were created during the project implementation. You can access them through our website under Everything You Wanted to Know about Structural Reforms.
We concluded the project with FISR Project Closing Ceremony: Integration Structural Reforms into Budgets by celebrating its achievements, learnings, challenges and opportunities: we boosted skills and capacities of finance and line ministries’ officials in the areas of costing of structural reforms, their impact on national budgets and economies, transparency of policy design, quality of ERP documents and inter- and intra-institutional coordination. We delivered more than 90 peer-to-peer and regional events (trainings, meetings, policy dialogues) dedicating to them more that 150 days. Involved were over 1,500 individuals (or over 3,000 participants) and 400 experts. For other FISR highlights, you are invited to browse Fiscal Implications of Structural Reforms in a Nutshell.
The project’s main stakeholders—ERP coordinators, their team members and experts—gathered all in person two long years after Covid-19 pandemic forced us to turn most of our activities online. The energy and excitement in Istanbul were palpable, in person and online for those who could not be in Turkey. As Jana Repanšek, CEF Director, nicely put: “Although there are hours of stories to tell, these are the words that come at the forefront to me at this time: community of very dedicated people, top-notch experts. Listening to you all sharing your memories made me very proud to be part of the CEF community that we have together created. They are years of dedicated work behind all of us in the CEF community. Now, we are more connected than ever before. Just imagine what we can all do together. Regards from Ljubljana with my heart in Istanbul.”
We at the CEF are proud and thankful of our CEF community: ERP teams, experts, and all others involved in the implementation of this project, and grateful for the opportunity entrusted to us by the European Commission (DG NEAR).
We are looking forward to continuing our structural reforms journey.