During their meeting in Trieste, on 12 June 2012, the CEI Committee of National Coordinators approved five technical cooperation projects for financing through the CEI Fund at the EBRD - entirely financed by the Italian Government. The overall commitment roughly amounts to 900,000 EUR.
The five projects are in line with the strategies governing the operations and activities of the CEI Fund at the EBRD. Geographically, the projects target non-EU CEI Member States. Two projects have a regional outreach, one project focuses on Serbia and two on Ukraine . The projects cover the sectors of agribusiness, energy, institutional development, municipal infrastructure, and SME support, which are also priority areas of the Fund. With these newly committed projects, the CEI Fund at the EBRD continues to support its countries of operations in effective and even innovative ways by targeting the areas in most need during the continuing economic crisis and volatility. The partnership between the CEI and the EBRD highly contributed to the development of a strong project-oriented dimension of the Initiative. This partnership has brought about outstanding results in terms of investments in the CEI Member States: the CEI-supported technical cooperation projects have led to €4.1 billion of investments provided by the Bank and other financiers. Thus, the CEI Fund at the EBRD has proved to be a very efficient and stimulating mechanism of cooperation. EBRD Vice President, Jan Fischer, will attend the CEI ministerial meeting to be held in Trieste on 13 June and will highlight the achievements of a partnership of this kind. In detail, the Training of Grain Farmers in Ukraine assignment addresses one of the most important problems of today’s world – sustainable agriculture, and the private sectors’ potential contribution towards food security. The project is related to two EBRD investments of about 50 million EUR aimed at financing a portion of pre-harvest and post-harvest working capital needs of Client Farms in future seasons. Two of the other projects aim to provide project preparation support. They are the Energy Audits Programme in the CEI Region and the Belgrade Public Transport and Traffic Infrastructure Project. The latter supports a 31.4 million EUR investment and will technically prepare the tender and assist with the procurement process involved in providing an energy efficient and reliable solution to Belgrade’s public transport shelter lighting. The former project, Energy Audits Programme in the CEI Region, is in line with the strong support that the CEI Fund has given the EBRD Sustainable Energy Initiative. As a matter of fact the CEI has already contributed to streamline this tool into the EBRD operations and significantly enhance the capability of the Bank to maximise sustainable energy investments and introduction of best practice across many. The future energy audits are expected to be linked to EBRD investments worth EUR 95 million. The fourth project aims at enhancing public governance, and in particular procurement, to achieve transition objectives. The Procurement Department at the EBRD together with the University of Tor Vergata (Rome, Italy) developed a pilot international Master in Procurement Management that specifically accommodates for procurement officials from the Bank’s and the CEI’s countries of operation. The main aim of the Master’s programme is to train different types of public officials to find procurement solutions to problems arising in highly dynamic contexts related to technology and markets. The CEI Fund at the EBRD will support the participation of professionals from CEI-non EU countries in the programme. The project Enterprise Growth Programme at Mixnet (Ukraine) aims at enabling a telecommunications company in Ukraine to design and implement a new environmentally responsible procurement system, to explore and develop new potential customer segments once new product is implemented in a company, and to redefine channel segments to support new product distribution.In 1992 Italy signed an Agreement with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) on the establishment of a CEI Fund at the EBRD “to assist the Bank’s countries of operation in central and eastern Europe in their economic and social transformation process”. The Fund, towards which the Italian Government has solely made a total contribution of €36.5 million, mainly provides grant-type assistance for specific components of Technical Cooperation (TC) projects. Since its inception, the Fund has provided more than €20.4 million for funding TC projects. The CEI Fund also contributed a total of more than €1.2 million to the Know-How Exchange Programme (KEP), which is its second most important instrument and a specific CE