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European Council on Refugees and Exiles
ECRE's capacity building projects and work with the membershipmission statement | structure | secretariat | ECRE's policy & advocacy work | ECRE's capacity building work | ELENA | support ECRE | annual reports ECRE began its work to support refugee-assisting NGOs in their development needs in 1991. The project began with an ambitious programme of legal seminars in Central Europe and then branched out into a wide range of trainings. Parallel with these developments ECRE facilitated a gradual engagement in its networks - ELENA (European Legal Network on Asylum) and ECRAN (ECRE Advocacy Network) - in membership applications and in regional coordination mechanisms. The principles underlying all this work in Central Europe, and that which characterised the future approach to all of ECRE's capacity building projects, was to respect the pace of NGO development and to respond to their specific and stated needs. The capacity building work in South Eastern Europe has been an ECRE project since 1993. The "lead agency" practice has applied to this project, with the Danish Refugee Council, the Dutch Refugee Council and the British Refugee Council consequently assuming responsibility for coordinating its activities on ECRE's behalf. An external evaluation of the work in 1998 recommended that the scope of this work was so central to ECRE's wider concerns that it should be integrated into the ECRE Secretariat as soon as practicable. This has now taken place. ECRE commissioned a feasibility study into expanding its capacity building
work into Eastern Europe in 1996 and since
1998 has been working in the region to provide high-quality and much-valued
training courses, workshops, organisational support and access to ECRE networks
and knowledge.
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