Nov 15, 2021

A Series of Successful Meetings with Our Member Country Albania

This fall we are successfully continuing with a delivery of in-country events aimed at developing capacities of line ministries to estimate implementation costs and financing resources of drafted structural reforms, while ensuring alignment with the latest European Commission’s Guidelines for the Economic Reform Programme (ERP) preparation. Last week our team joined public officials involved in the design, costing and budgeting of structural reforms in Albania.

During this learning and knowledge sharing event participants looked into novelties from the European Commission’s Guidance for the ERP 2022-2024 and how they influence the ERP preparation process. They also discussed improvements in describing and costing of the ERP measures and how these can contribute to realistic costs and secured funding for their implementation. Outcomes and recommendations of the analysis of the ERP assessment report for Albania were also presented. The event took place on November 9, 20221 and was delivered as part of the EU funded multi-country project “Strengthening Line Ministries’ Capacities to Assess Fiscal Implications of Structural Reforms” (FISR) implemented by the CEF.

During the visit to Albania Jana Repanšek, CEF Director, and Irena Lukač, Chief Partnership Officer, also met with Gent Sejko, Governor of the Bank of Albania, and Delina Ibrahimaj, Minister of Finance and Economy. With the Governor and the Minister we discussed their institutions’ involvement in CEF Governing Board as Albania will next June 2022 take over from Slovenia chairing of the CEF Governing Board. This will be a great opportunity for Albania to deepen collaboration and ties with the CEF and showcase its capacities and progress achieved. Governor Sejko was also very pleased with our fruitful cooperation in promoting and engaging the expertise of Bank of Albania’s colleagues as lecturing experts and/or participants at the CEF’s learning and knowledge sharing events. In addition, we agreed with the Ministry of Finance and Economy to continue a dialogue on our joint development of the training of internal auditors in the public sector of Albania and collaborating when organizing the conference Moving from Bureaucratic to Technocratic Systems of Governance that will take place in Tirana on June 28-29, 2022.

While in Albania we also met with Kleopatra Maliqi, General Director of the Albanian School of Public Administration. We recognized many opportunities for our cooperation which can be a good ground for signing a memorandum of understanding between our organizations in the coming year. We also agreed to organize an online knowledge sharing session to learn from each other’s experience regarding the design and delivery of the e-learning courses.