The latest meeting of the SKILLS+ partnership took place on 30 August 2018 in Kajaani, Finland, cross-border hosted by Kainuun Etu Oy. The discussion of partners focused on the elaboration of action plans to transfer the learning of the policy learning phase to the policy instruments selected by the partners.
The discussion showed that especially the peer review phase has been very beneficial. On one hand, the visits to other partner areas facilitated an in-depth investigation about good practices and their transferability, on the other hand the participation of different stakeholders in the peer review process created a momentum of support for meaningful actions. In three cases, pending the final confirmation of the responsible ERDF Managing authorities, calls for projects will be modified using the SKILLS+ learning. If no obstacles are discovered in the next weeks, these modified calls will amount to more than 20 millions Euro.
In other countries or regions, partners focus on revising existing strategies or the preparation of projects that enable the implementation of activities to transfer good practice approaches of other partners. In Kajaani, partners also discussed how the successful implementation of their action plans can be monitored in Phase 2 through action and result-oriented indicators.
For all addressed areas, action plans will be elaborated until the end of 2018 involving a wide range of stakeholders. Video-clips will make the action plans more comprehensible for people that are not familiar with the world of Interreg. The final action plans and video-clips will be presented in a Mid-term Workshop hosted by the Lead partner in Magdeburg on 12 March 2019. Please mark your calendars!
