The annual EEA and Norway Grants conference on risk and good governance was held in Tallinn 24-25 September. The two-day seminar focused on results and risk management in the EEA and Norway Grants, as well as key findings and main mitigating actions resulting from the corruption risk filtering exercise.
As of September 2014, 1979 projects are under way in 150 programmes in 16 Beneficiary states. Partners from one of the donor countries – Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway – are involved in 569 of these projects.
With a large number of programmes and projects in the implementation phase, there is a heavy focus on achieving the expected results. 2015 will also be a big year for implementation and progress towards results. In these efforts, results and risk management are essential tools.
“After spending several years designing, negotiating and initiating some 150 programmes, we are now in the middle of implementation. Progress over the coming months is crucial,” Stub said.
Results and risks
Results based management involves setting clear objectives and targets for what you want to achieve, developing sound indicators and measuring the progress of the various programmes towards their objectives.
Read more about how we manage for results
Risk management helps recognise potential problems – from low political, legal or local support to capacity or fraud – and identify ways to overcome them. Since corruption affects the quality of services that people depend on and often hits the poor and marginalised the hardest, managing corruption risk is integral to achieving what the Grants set out to do. This also safeguards the use of public resources.
Read more about how we manage risk
Cooperation
The seminar was organised by the Financial Mechanism Office in collaboration with Transparency International. The partnership with TI dates back to 2011, where the EEA and Norway Grants entered into a framework agreement with TI to help improve good governance. TI has designed a Corruption Risk Assessment Tool to identify and assess risks for every programme receiving support through the Grants.