Tag: consultations

EU drugs strategy 2013-20 evaluation

Posted on by Milutin

The European Commission launched a consultation to gather stakeholders’ feedback on the EU Drugs Strategy 2013-2020 and the EU Action Plan on Drugs 2017-2020, as they are approaching the end of their cycle.

The consultation addresses all main policy areas of the Drugs Strategy, including drug demand and drug supply reduction and three cross-cutting themes, namely coordination, international cooperation and information, research and evaluation. Similar to the entire evaluation exercise, the consultation looks at the effectiveness, efficiency, relevance and coherence of the actions undertaken to cover the areas mentioned, as well as at the achieved EU added value.

The Commission seeks to gather input from a broad range of stakeholders, including public authorities and administrations at national, regional and local levels including customs and law enforcement, academia, anti-drugs and health related civil society and non-governmental organisations, chemical and medical industry representatives, practitioners involved in the drugs or health policy fields and private individuals. Anyone affected by illicit drug use is especially welcome to respond to this public consultation.

You can contribute to this consultation by filling in the online questionnaire. Questionnaires are available in some or all official EU languages. You can submit your responses in any official EU language.

The final results of the evaluation will be used by the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council and Member States in the future decision-making process regarding drug policy.

To get more information and contribute to the consultations, please follow this link>>>

Terms of reference for technical consultant to support field data collection on NPS in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Serbia

Posted on by snezana

EHRAIn the framework of project “New Psychoactive Substance Use in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Serbia” Eurasian Harm Reduction Association (EHRA) is seeking to engage technical consultants, one consultant per country, for conducting research on new psychoactive substances (hereinafter – NPS) use in the four countries. This research project is a collaboration between EHRA and the the School of Law, Swansea University, UK.

The assessment is aimed to analyze existing evidence and documents to overview the

  1. existing statistics/data on NPS use from various sources,
  2. researches of patterns of use and procurement of NPS (via clubs, darknet, etc),
  3. existing algorithms of ambulance and police actions, and
  4. availability of harm reduction services for NPS users, and how existing services needs to adapt to meet the needs created by NPS in four countries – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia and Serbia. This research will be conducted using the same methodology as one, done already in Moldova and Belarus.

The potential candidates should:

  • collect national data sources (such as website links, documents (in word, pdf formats), presentations and other materials) on NPS (documents and research data on drug use, behavior and harm reduction services, existing laws on health and drug policy). If documents are in national language – to make summary of the document with main quotes and translate it into English or Russian;
    to organize the field data collection:
  • recruit respondents from community of people who use drugs for focus-groups;
  • arrange interviews with officials from law enforcement and health services, harm reduction services (list of needed interviewees will be agreed with EHRA);
  • according the collected national sources on NPS use, together with EHRA staff member to adjust questionnaire for interviews/ focus groups;
  • organize logistics for the interviews/ focus-groups (place, time, coffee breaks for focus-group participants);
  • make notes during interviews and focus-groups;
  • make transcripts of the focus group discussion and interviews (in Russian or English);
  • help EHRA staff member to validate data of the report prepared by EHRA with respondents.

Soft copies of all collected data and minutes of interviews should be shared with EHRA via DropBox or GoogleDrive. In case of using quotes from individuals, the consultant must have a signed informed consent from each interviewee.

The candidates are invited to submit their CV and letter of interest with suggested respondents list, and state the daily rate in EUR (should be provided in EHRA’s template) by e-mail referenced under title “Technical Consultant” to Eliza Kurcevic at eliza@harmreductioneurasia.org by 5th January 2020, 24:00 EET. Results will be announced by January 10th, 2020. Each candidate will be contacted individually.

For more information about the Association and specifics of the work follow this link.

 

EU drugs strategy 2013-20 – evaluation

Posted on by Milutin

The European Commission launched a process of evaluation of the current EU drugs strategy. The Commission seeks to gather input from a broad range of stakeholders, including public authorities and administrations at national, regional and local levels including customs and law enforcement, academia, anti-drugs and health related civil society and non-governmental organisations, chemical and medical industry representatives, practitioners involved in the drugs or health policy fields and private individuals. Anyone affected by illicit drug use is especially welcome to respond to this public consultation.

The objective of this consultation is to gather stakeholders’ feedback on the EU Drugs Strategy 2013-2020 and the EU Action Plan on Drugs 2017-2020, as they are approaching the end of their cycle.

The consultation addresses all main policy areas of the Drugs Strategy, including drug demand and drug supply reduction and three cross-cutting themes, namely coordination, international cooperation and information, research and evaluation. Similar to the entire evaluation exercise, the consultation looks at the effectiveness, efficiency, relevance and coherence of the actions undertaken to cover the areas mentioned, as well as at the achieved EU added value.

A synopsis of the responses received will be included in the Staff Working Document that will be produced to summarise the findings of the evaluation. The final results of the evaluation will be used by the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council and Member States in the future decision-making process regarding drug policy.

Questionnaires are available in some or all official EU languages. One can submit your responses in any official EU language.

For reasons of transparency, organisations and businesses taking part in public consultations are asked to register in the EU’s Transparency Register.

The deadline for consultations is 4 February 2020.

To respond to the questionnaire, please follow this link>>>

 

SEE civil society organisations consultations

Posted on by Milutin

Preparing for the regional dialogue with donors, civil society organisations from South East Europe met in Belgrade, Serbia on 17 January 2018. The aim of the meeting is to discuss current developments regarding the work of the South East Europe Regional Coordinating Mechanism (RCM) and preparation process of the multi-country application, possible cooperation with EECA regional networks as well as opportunities for advocacy funding initiatives sustaining HIV prevention services in South East Europe. Around 30 representatives of the civil society organisations (CSOs) from all SEE countries participated.

Ana Filipovska, the RCM Coordinator and Milutin Milošević, DPNSEE Executive Director, presented recent work of the RCM and the call for multi-country application to the Global Fund to fight HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. The presentations and discussions following then helped to clarify some misunderstandings. Two regional initiatives for the project to the Global Fund were presented – Alliance and EHRA, ECOM, SWAN.

Milutin Milošević, DPNSEE Executive Director, delivering presentation

CSOs were invited to actively contribute to the work of Country Coordinating Mechanisms in expressing the country needs and designing a regional project.

The meeting was organised by HERA and Zaedno Posilni, supported by the Open Society Foundations.

Consultative meetings to build the Action Plan for Youth

Posted on by Milutin

In accordance with the principles of youth policy and the current practice in the preparation of regulations and public policies, the Ministry of Youth and Sports invited everyone interested, and especially young people, representatives of youth and for youth organisations, as well as local youth offices, to become involved in the process of drafting future three-year Action Plan for the implementation of the National Youth Strategy. Consultative meetings provided an opportunity to jointly review the results achieved by the Strategy so far, and to define a priority proposal for the period until 2020. Through a series of 5 meetings, aim was to together with young people and those who represent their interests, define the proposals of activities, measures and indicators for the next Action Plan.

Consultative meetings were organized by following themes:

  • Employability and employment of young people,
  • Development of competences and active participation of young people in society,
  • Health, well-being and safety of youth,
  • Information, Culture and Youth Mobility and
  • Social inclusion of youth from categories at risk of social exclusion.

DPNSEE representatives participated in the meetings on Health, well/being and safety and also Social inclusion, two the most relalevant areas to our mission. Our member organisastions Prevent and Re Generacija participated in various conslutations too.

Each consultation was organised in two sections. First was evaluation of the work done over three specific objectives, using the indicators of results to be achieved by the Action Plan 2015 to 2017. The second part of the meeting was focused on the discussion of measures and possible new indicators and expected results related to the specific goals of the Youth Action Plan in the period from 2018 to 2020. The conclusions of the meeting can be seen as the guidelines that are showing which points of the Action Plan are considered as the most important in this next phase. However, sharp criticism regarding indicators of the previous action plan points out that they should be more carefully set up.