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Description
Project seeks to address the lack of meaningful and informed engagements of the Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) in EU-Africa relationships building, which is currently among the highest EU priorities. There is also a need for new participants to engage with African countries, colonial and traditional, without donor-recipient relations, who could contribute to changing the established dynamics and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Due to a lack of competences and experience of the Baltic states, neither the public authorities, the media nor academia can ensure a meaningful debate on this issue. Given the needs of our target audience - the Baltic policy makers - to deepen their knowledge and expertise in EU-Africa policy making and to clarify their own positions on EU-Africa relations, the solution proposed by our project is a public policy expert debate based on an analysis of Baltic experiences, attitudes and interests. With this project, we seek to encourage Baltic policymakers to deliberately engage in EU-Africa relations on the basis of the Sustainable Development Goals and the equal partnership principle. Seeking to ensure project sustainability and long-term impact, implementation of project activities will be methodologically oriented to stimulate active engagement of Baltic countries’ policy makers and will create conditions for the target group to refine possible strategic foreign policy initiatives, discuss their implementation and establish progress monitoring mechanism.
Civil society involvement in foreign policy making is more complex by its nature (while CSO capacities in this area are often dependent on government (non-)funding), but the lack of established principles and Baltics’ strategy for the African region offers a unique opportunity for CSOs to contribute to foreign policy making that would be based on the SDGs and equal partnership building.