Deadline: 17-Jan-22
The Eastern Partnership (EaP) Civil Society Facility is delighted to announce that its prestigious EU-funded Fellowship programme is now looking for its 5th cohort of Fellows.
Objective
The main objective of the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Fellowships is to support civil society activists or civically minded women and men who demonstrate a deep commitment to leading positive social change in their communities (including IT experts such as software engineers, data scientists, designers who innovate at the intersection of technology and the needs of their communities). The Fellowships will build the Fellows’ capacity to constructively engage with communities and authorities and contribute to reforms in the EaP countries.
Themes
The Fellowships should be linked to the priority themes of the EaP and areas of particular challenging nature in the region:
- Having a resilient, sustainable and integrated economy
- Strengthening accountability, rule of law, and security
- Ensuring environmental and climate resilience
- Contributing to resilient and inclusive digitalization
- Promoting participatory decision-making and social justice
Types of Fellowships
There are two different types of Fellowship which make up the program in this phase. These two types are explained below.
- Community Engagement Fellowships: Community Engagement Fellowships are designed to support Fellows engaging in one or more of the following activities:
- Collecting local evidence: supporting fellows to collect and analyze evidence on key issues of public service delivery at local and national level.
- Involvement in policy-making: allowing fellows to gain expertise on specific policy issues, draft policy paper / recommendations and organize advocacy campaigns; helping fellows get access to government channels in order to better get their ideas across.
- Capacity development: supporting mentoring and job shadowing schemes and involving fellows in training of trainers in order to train other members of their organizations, as well as members of other CSOs from relevant networks.
- Involvement in monitoring public administration activity and results: supporting fellows in developing a multitude of monitoring activities, including on technical issues such as public financial management, budget transparency and oversight.
- Improvement of CSO accountability and link to constituencies: supporting fellows in improving the transparency and accountability mechanisms of their organizations and in better linking activities to citizens’ needs.
- Cooperation between CSOs: allowing fellows to organize activities bringing various CSOs together on issues of common interest.
- Civic Digital Fellowships: The Civic Digital Fellowships will facilitate Fellows to use their expertise to contribute to, develop or further promote and raise awareness about technological solutions for community needs. These Fellowships are designed to support Fellows engaging in one or more of the following activities:
- Advocacy campaigns on issues such as open data, data quality, e-services for citizens, and budgetary transparency.
- Improving the quality of data (such as making existing public data machine-readable or generating and publishing open and reusable data needed for further development digital solutions for transparency and accountability in the region).
- Developing new digital solutions addressing community needs, helping citizens better hold governments to account and / or contributing to the improvement of public services.
- Promoting / rolling out and expanding the existing civic tech solutions that address community needs, help citizens better hold governments to account and / or contribute to the improvement of public services, and building the relevant skills of the potential users.
Award Information
Fellows will be able to obtain an average of 5,000 euros in financial support for their Fellowship. In addition, the Eastern Partnership Civil Society Facility project team will support Fellows to benefit from suitable e-learning activities and organizational / operational capacity development trainings / webinars.
Eligibility Criteria
In order to be eligible for a fellowship the applicant must:
- be a natural person;
- be a national of one of the Eastern Partnership countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine);
- be above 18 years old;
- not previously have benefited from the fellowship within this program;
- have a proven track record of:
- for community engagement fellowships, working (including by volunteering) either in a civil society organization, including Trade Unions, cooperatives, or professional association, or with a civic engagement group or initiative group and / or taking a leading role in his / her community by advancing issues related to public service delivery and accountability, and developing local capacities;
- for civic digital fellowships, professionally contributing to the development of IT solutions and / or voluntarily developing innovative digital products;
- have a good working level of English, as well as have appropriate language skills for the chosen location of the proposed action;
- assume responsibility for the action proposed and show commitment for the action proposed.
Proof of citizenship and age can be provided by a passport copy.
For more information, visit https://eapcivilsociety.eu/news/fellowships-news/2021-fellowship-call.html