The
topics that were covered in the
1st day of the Interim Reporting Project Phase Training include:
- Grant Contract Management: purpose, main actors, flow of communication; overview of Special Conditions (Articles 1-7); overview of Annexes I-X (Article 6); overview of General Conditions (Annex II); General Provisions: obligation to provide reports, ownership, use of results and assets, monitoring and evaluation, amendment of the contract; Financial Provisions: eligible costs, payments, deadlines, currency conversion, accounting, final amount of the grant, recovery.
- Programme and Finance Management: introduction, programme management compared/contrasted to finance management; main challenges from practice: frequent circulation of staff, communication issues with partners and stakeholders, low involvement of target groups, poor EU visibility of the project; eligible costs: definition and types, how to identify them; proof documents: definition and types, how to identify and collect them; filing system; accounting system.
- Grant Contract Modifications: overview of the contractual obligations, procedures to follow, presentation of examples and main mistakes; amendment compared/contrasted to modification; how to distinguish between minor vs. significant changes in grant contracts; timeframe for notification to the Contracting Authority.
The participants have also done practical exercises in:
- Problems in Project Implementation: what to do when the current project manager leaves, when activities are delayed, the new president of the partner organization shows no interest in further cooperation, unjustified expenditure of project funds, unsuccessful tendering procedures, poor output (e.g. research report) by the hired staff.
- Definition of the List and Content of Proof Documents.
- Budget Modification: examples of smaller changes requiring notification vs. bigger changes requiring addendum vs. changes that are not allowed.
The theoretical input was delivered at plenary sessions, with the help of Power Point presentations, whereas the exercises were implemented in 4 small working groups, with the help of hand-outs and flip-chart presentations.
The training was delivered by our Expert for EU Grants, Ms Andreja Tonč, with the relevant input by our Team Leader and Senior Expert, Ms Maria Marinakou, and the support from our Assistant Team Leader, Mr Radomir Trajković.
The training was delivered to 4 training groups on 11th, 12th, 14th and 15th of April 2016, in the Porta Hotel in Skopje.