Grants for implementation of six-month projects have been awarded to 18 civil society organizations from six countries: Macedonia, Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which will address urgent local and national issues in the upcoming period in order to advance good governance and the rule of law.

Awardees from Bosnia and Herzegovina are:

The organization UAMPI BUM (Association for Alternative Music Production and Publishing BOOM) shall implement the “Preglasaj” project, created as a collaboration with UNSA Geto (Association for Independent Creators and Activists GETO) and Impuls Portal, as a necessity to reach new content on our media and journalism scene. In our country, this year is an election year and every election year here is overcrowded and overstuffed with useless information and negative campaigns of political opponents. The real problems voters actually face remain hidden under the surface, yet again. Preglasaj is a project that will produce textual works and video reports which will speak about real problems young people face and their lives. The content will be created by students and activists under the guidance of experienced journalists from Bosnia and Herzegovina and our region.

The organization Association for Media and Civil Society Development (URMCD) and its media partner web portal Perspektiva.plus have the „Faktograf“ project idea. The need for this project is a result of lacking accountability of political stakeholders and growing presence of false information and „fake news“. Regular use of dishonest campaigning and misleading promises by the country’s politicians helps them gain voter sympathy but also presents a manipulative tactic that has not been called out by the media that often. Thus, news are rarely fast checked and usually a form of spreading misinformation. Since there is no video format that tackles this topic URMCD and Perspektiva.plus decided to create one. By producing 5 episode miniseries to identify misleading narratives in popular media and politics, map financial and political motivations for their existence and to find key actors in their production this project aims to help make political accountability a key expectation of the general public in the electoral process of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to raise general public’s expectation toward media platforms in terms of quality and reliability of the cited sources. Also its objective is to initialize and provide a starting audience for a grassroots online based video platform to be oriented exclusively towards fast-checking news sources and politician’s credibility in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The organization Centre for Policy and Governance shall implement “Consistency of the budget with reforms” (Budžet u ogledalu)

The overall objective of this project is to enhance the role of civil society and media during the pre-election period by providing objective information on the commitment of authorities to the socioeconomic reforms. This overall objective will be achieved through: advocacy for fiscal policies in line with the goals of the socioeconomic reforms, advocacy for accountability of the authorities in relation to distribution of public funds and targeting of those in need and reaching out to citizens and getting them interested in socioeconomic topics during the pre-election period. Concrete activities include: research on the consistency of budgets with reforms (identifying the most important weak spots of 2018 budgets which are not in line with the socioeconomic reforms), advocacy campaign (writing analytical articles in partnership with one of the leading online news portals in the country – BUKA and managing a social media campaign) and an event during the peak of the pre-election campaigns (to inform citizens about the importance of looking beyond the populist topics into the socioeconomic policies of the parties which are competing in elections).

Center for Civic Cooperation Livno – Towards Local Government Accountability: Improving Local Community Communication project has the aim to improve communication of local communities with citizens, municipal authorities and media in six municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Pro Educa – Local Administration Employment Before and After Local Elections in Republika Srpska project aims to locate the employment level over the course of an electoral year and address the issue in order to eliminate this impediment toward democratic society.

Liberalni forum – “Towards efficient and transparent SOEs” – The overall objective of this project is to enhance the role of civil society and media by providing objective information on efficiency of some of the biggest SOEs in BiH.

These grants are dedicated to local civil society organizations, and have been awarded within the ACTION SEE – Accountability, Technology and Institutional Openness Network in SEE project, which is implemented by Center for Democratic Transition (CDT) from Montenegro, Metamorphosis Foundation from Macedonia, Westminster Foundation for Democracy from Great Britain, CRTA – Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability from Serbia, Citizens Association Why not? from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Open Data Kosovo – ODK from Kosovo and Levizja Mjaft! from Albania, with financial support of the European Union.