EGTC-Workshop 2023/1 (Budapest)

The first EGTC workshop of 2023 took place in Budapest, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFA) on 29 March 2023, jointly organised and financed by the MFA and CESCI.

As Péter Kiss-Parciu, Deputy State Secretary of the MFA, said in his welcoming speech: the meeting was basically a specialised workshop, where the EGTCs and the MFA staff discussed the current tasks and opportunities of the groupings.  In his speech, the Deputy State Secretary also pointed out that the Hungarian government remains committed to supporting the agile EGTCs, and that it is important for the groupings to play a role in the implementation of more, and increasingly significant projects and services.

The second presentation of the workshop was held by Balázs Zám, Department for Cross-Border Cooperation Programmes (MFA), in which, he presented the expected schedule for announcing calls for proposals in the specific border regions. He said that, except for the Croatian-Hungarian border region, all cross-border programmes already have a cooperation programme approved by the European Commission for the period 2021-2027. He outlined the budgets allocated for each programme to implement specific objectives. The first call for proposals under the Slovenian-Hungarian programme was announced at the beginning of March. The calls for proposals of the other programmes will also be announced shortly.

During the second half of the workshop, the different technical issues were discussed. Viktória Rakonczai-Veress, financial expert of the Department for Regional and Cross-Border Development (MFA), together with the staff of the Grant Management Department, outlined the new financial accounting regulation regarding the operational and project-related financial support of the EGTCs. At the end of the technical part of the workshop, Kitti Dubniczki, Director of CESCI, initiated an interactive discussion with the representatives of the EGTCs on some technical issues that could further strengthen the networking and international visibility of Hungarian groupings in the long term.

The workshop finished with a joint lunch.