IREI will work on capacity building and the exchange of knowledge and experience in the areas of citizen participation and digitalisation of municipal services througout 2023 through the project “Strengthening ties and learning between the twinned municipalities of Centar Sarajevo and Reggio Emilia”. The project is supported fiancially by a grant from the Central European Initiative's Know-how Exchange Programme (KEP).
IREI and the partner municipalities will jointly focus on sharing knowledge and experiences from the two specific goals of the program, which relate to the following two items:
1. Work on building a stronger democratic political culture
2. Digitization of municipal services.
As part of this project, the experiences and innovations that the municipality of Regio Emilia has already implemented in its local community will be of great value and relate to citizen participation in decision-making at the local level specifically since 2005 with a strong emphasis on social inclusion and social innovation. They implement this through a project to transform local municipal centers into centers for social innovation and digital hubs that are available for use by all citizens, and through a project to network city services with a focus on urban mobility and citizen health, through which they want to increase the independence of elderly citizens. It is worth mentioning social inclusion through the “Duga” project, which aims to prevent the appearance of challenging forms of behavior in children from socially vulnerable groups through the development of socio-emotional competencies and life skills that contribute to the improvement of their mental health. Reggio Emilia will participate in this project as a municipality itself but also through the work of its E35 Foundation for international projects.
In the coming period, mutual visits of the delegations of the Centar Sarajevo Municipality to Italy and the Reggio Emilia Municipality to Bosnia and Herzegovina are planned in order for the employees of these local government units to get to know their colleagues who work in similar positions and thus exchange their knowledge and positive practices that they apply in their work. The result of this project will be the creation of a manual on best practices, which will contain practices from Italy (Reggio Emilia) and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which will be distributed to all municipalities and cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They will also be available to the general public so that they too can become familiar with innovative approaches to solving the problem of citizen participation in decision-making and digitalization of municipal services.
This project is realized through the Know-how Exchange Program (KEP), which is financed by the Central European Initiative – CEI. The project will be implemented in the period from January 1, 2023 to December 31, 2023.