EUKI Academy

©Markus Spiske/ Unsplash.com©Markus Spiske/ Unsplash.com

­The European Climate Initiative (EUKI) fosters European cooperation to strengthen climate action and mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The EUKI Academy plays an important role here. With its activities, it contributes significantly to the achievement of the three EUKI goals.

Complementary to project funding, the EUKI Academy supports the implementation of the EUKI Projects and thus strengthens the desired transformative change in the area of climate action in the target countries.

The EUKI Academy runs training courses and holds a range of events to facilitate discussion and information-sharing. These are designed to make projects more sustainable by:

  • passing on knowledge about approaches to climate change mitigation in different sectors,
  • strengthening the institutional capacity of NGOs so that they can play a key role in climate policy discussions,
  • making projects more effective, especially in terms of financial management,
  • ensuring that implementing organisations have the required knowledge and expertise so that they can prepare their own funding requests to donors, especially the EU.

Figure: The four goals of the EUKI Academy

Range of Services of the EUKI Academy

Dissemination of climate policy issues

Many of our implementing organisations and partners have built up a great deal of valuable experience in greenhouse gas reduction through projects funded by EUKI. That experience is then made available in the form of regular online seminars to other EUKI projects, the European climate community and members of the public with an interest in climate issues. The Academy also holds its own courses and events to pass on information about specific policy areas and future climate-related issues.

Capacity Development

The Academy offers a range of strategic HR development activities designed to build up the skills of both technical and managerial personnel working for EUKI implementing organisations. The focus here is on transferring knowledge of cross-sectoral methodologies in the following areas:

• project planning and management
• legal and commercial expertise
• public relations
• preparation of funding applications.

Networking

EUKI has set up various platforms to facilitate networking across borders and between individual sectors.

The Academy’s most important networking event is the annual EUKI Conference which brings together representatives of all projects. The EUKI Secretariat organises national networking events in its priority countries in collaboration with selected projects.

The Secretariat also develops other ‘occasional’ networking platforms, e.g. the EUKI ‘Lunch Lottery’ during the coronavirus pandemic.