On April 24, the Ister-Granum EGTC officially joined the BorderLabs CE project with a regional kick-off conference and the first local stakeholder meeting. The event focused on identifying market barriers for local producers in the Slovak-Hungarian border region and exploring ways to increase the availability of local products at the international level.

The meeting presented the project’s objectives, which are to promote networking and market access for local economic actors, with a particular focus on cross-border cooperation. The participants jointly identified the markets operating in the region, craft producers, and the services that support them, such as restaurants and accommodation providers. A key objective of the project is to enable local products to reach public institutions, overcoming the challenges of price and volume competition with large companies.

The event highlighted the importance of joint thinking and knowledge sharing between stakeholders, which is key to developing sustainable economic development models on both sides of the border.