How to Win EuropeAid Funding: A Conversation with Koos Richelle

Navigating the European Union’s complex aid architecture can be tough, especially for smaller organizations located in the developing world.

In the third and final installment of our interview with Koos Richelle, the EuropeAid director-general discusses ways civil society organizations may influence decisions made in Brussels, network with EU country delegations and gain access to EuropeAid funding.

The Civil Society Helpdesk, or CiSocH, aims to involve all relevant stakeholders in discussions on EU development policies, as well as program design and implementation. From the EuropeAid perspective, what are the outcomes of CiSocH?

I can give two answers on this. First of all, the [outlook] for the future. It is very essential that we have in the first half of 2011 a profound debate on the future of development cooperation. Europe is preparing the financial perspectives for the multiannual budget for 2014-’20 and the commission has to [draft] its proposals not late into June 2011. We prepare these proposals by presenting a number of discussion papers. We call them green books. They are discussion papers and there we’d like to get as much information as possible. We have produced green papers on issues like the future of development cooperation and what it should be or on the future of budget support, for instance. So, there are important questions that have been asked and we organize debates about this with our stakeholders.