Working Together to Improve Governance and Anticorruption
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this call for proposals has been updated.
Across the Central and Eastern European region, citizens often face public institutions which are unaccountable, corrupt, and undermine democratic processes and the quality of public services. To address this, interventions only focused on monitoring, advocacy, and legal reform have largely proven insufficient to generate positive change. At the same time, we witness promising experiences of public sector–civil society collaborations on these challenges in the region. However, the fast-evolving coronavirus crisis brings new corruption risks. These risks relate to the public health crisis and to overall government responses to plan for the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis.
We are issuing an updated call for applications for civil society–driven initiatives aiming to 1) increase transparency, accountability, and public participation processes to strengthen public institutions with a collaborative approach; 2) address and mitigate the corruption risks related to the COVID-19 crisis.
Eligibility Criteria
Eligible countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia
We invite applications from registered civil society and/or nonprofit organizations (or consortia of organizations) with a background in anticorruption and/or good governance fields as well as working at local and/or national levels in one of the following countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.
Ineligibility Criteria
The Open Society Initiative for Europe will not fund partisan political activities (i.e., activities that express support for a certain political party or support for political parties or elected officials are not eligible). Political party–affiliated associations are likewise not eligible to apply.
In the context of this call, we will not fund projects which are only focused on monitoring and exposing corruption or other governance problems. We will also not fund general civic activism, unless there is a specific link to solution-oriented approaches using transparency, accountability, or participation processes. Neither will we fund academic research on corruption or governance or mapping studies. In the framework of this call, we will not fund general organizational/core funding requests to provide financial sustainability to current work.