In order to boost further regional cooperation and support its participants in their efforts to map and efficiently coordinate donor activities in the Western Balkans the Regional Cooperation Council Secretariat had organised its First Meeting on Donor Coordination in the Western Balkans in Sarajevo on 12-13 February 2015.

Aimed at achieving a better alignment of regional governments’ development priorities, donors’ sectoral priorities with the priorities set out in the South East Europe (SEE) 2020 Strategy the meeting yielded with a number of conclusions and recommendations including possibility to rationalize the division of labour among donors, a need to improve coordination around sector working groups as well as to provide more donor resources to underfunded initiatives, and to create a single regional donor coordination database or a cooperative network of national donor coordination databases.

This resulted in official conclusion of the meeting to create a single regional donor coordination database or cooperative network of national donor coordination database. Respectively RCC published a call for consulting services for developing a South East Europe Donor Assistance Database (SEEDAD) application which helped creating webpage you are visiting in the moment.

The SEE donor assistance database (SEEDAD) should over the time evolve to be the central regional database of the SEE region, providing data on donor assistance to the region through detailed information on regional projects, follow up on the dynamics of the projects’ implementation with a clear overview of the sectors covered with the project on multilateral basis by collecting comprehensive and up-to-date data and ensuring their wider accessibility.

SEEDAD should contribute to avoiding of overlapping of the assistance and creation of clearer overview of priority sectors for the purpose of allocation the assistance and should create solid base for informed decision making, policy creation and negotiations with donors.

The success and effective utilization of SEEDAD depends on active engagement of all interested parties – active and potential donors as well as beneficiaries of regional actions – and it represents the very first phase in establishing the donor coordination in the region. Therefore it is of outmost importance to keep all data available up-to-date and to signal if any errors/omissions are made.